A lot of musicians will be infuriated by this ‘world’s first generative AI guitar’, but I think its automatic tabulation and learning features sound genuinely smart — but only if the AI’s ethical
- TemPolor Melo-D guitar promises to create entire songs from singing or playing a melody, using AI
- Auto-generated backing tracks and guitar tabulation, too
- $349 early bird on Kickstarter
Ever wished you could get AI to help you play guitar and compose songs? Melo-D promises to do just that. It claims to be the “world’s first generative AI guitar”, and it can turn your musical ideas into full tracks. It’ll even do the singing for you.
The Melo-D looks like a more-advanced Guitar Hero controller and works in much the same way as many MIDI guitars. It has a neck modelled on real guitars with colored LEDs on top to show you where to put your fingers if you’re learning to play, and there are six string-like paddles for you to fingerpick or strum. There’s a flip-up screen for controlling it, and a companion app for your phone.
You can use that app to generate tunes, for example by singing a melody and getting the app to turn that into notes, which it will then show you on the Melo-D so you play what you sang. And it can generate backing tracks, turn your notes into piano chords or even adding AI vocals.
Melo-D also uses generative AI to create tablature — the little grids that show players where to put their fingers for each chord; upload a track and the AI will turn it into tab that you can then play on your guitar. That makes it really useful for beginners, and bad news for guitar tab websites.
It’s all very clever and with an early bird price of $379 it’s not too expensive either.
But the big question about any AI music-generating tool is whether it’s ethical…
Is generative AI good for musicians?
There’s huge debate in music over generative AI, and not just because of AI slop in streaming services. As with other artforms, many musicians have seen their music used without consent or payment to train AI datasets for firms that then profit from their work. So if you care about musicians as well as making music, it’s important to know where the AI gets its musical knowledge from.
I asked TemPolor, the creator of Melo-D as well as the Tunee AI service, and it told me that the guitar uses its own TemPolor platform, which is based on royalty-free music. Royalty-free music means music such as public domain, Creative Commons-licensed and library music that you can use without paying for a license. The music you make with the Melo-D is therefore royalty-free.
However, that doesn’t appear to be the only dataset here. TemPolor’s Melo-D FAQ states that “we power our AI music features using a combination of our own models and select best-in-class third-party AI models, chosen based on the creative scenario to ensure the highest quality output.”
The same firm’s Tunee service is a multi-agent platform including models that have already been sued by artists claiming copyright infringement.
That’s enough to give me pause. As much as I want everyone to experience the joy of making music, I want my favorite musicians to be able to pay the rent too, and there’s enough ambiguity in TemPolar’s small print that I’m not sure I’d feel ethically free and clear using its AI.
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