Producing music is hard. I’ve finished a handful of tracks, and I think they’re pretty bad.

I tried to explain to Devin what I’m building at https://trygroove.app/ today.

I started making music during lockdown. I’d been DJing and messing around in Ableton since I was a student, but I never learned an instrument. Then I saw Kink playing live in his pyjamas streaming on YouTube and I thought “I have no idea what he’s doing but it’s awesome!” I bought some gear and started jamming.

After doing jams for while and trying different things, eventually I thought about making tracks to share. I started learning about production. I watched hours and hours of YouTube videos. I bought the full Ableton suite. This year I took some lessons. Man, producing music is hard. It is a hugely challenging thing to master. My hat is off to anyone who has ever released music.

Last year, Andrej Karpathy talked about AI and the autonomy slider. By embedding LLMs into complex tools, we can give people the ability to control how much the AI does, when it drives autonomously, when it tackles tightly-scoped tasks and when you drive. Immediately I thought of music production. I don’t want to prompt Suno. It’s not my music that comes back. I want to make my tracks myself, but I want an experienced, smart producer sitting next me, able to understand what I’m trying to achieve and giving me the tools and techniques to do it.

Around the same time I met a few new producers and got to see the major DAWs through their eyes. I spent an hour with a friend failing to get his MIDI keyboard to talk to Ableton on Windows. DAWs are insanely powerful tools, and they’re just overwhelming for most producers. I love music hardware, particularly grooveboxes – a category of machine which combines a minimal set of sound-making tools into a focussed workflow that helps you actually make music.

I feel strongly that by combining the pared-back, focussed workflow of a groovebox, with the advice and support of an LLM, in a format that anyone can easily dive into, I can create a better tool for learning how to produce.

I’m building it at https://trygroove.app/. Its a music studio (a DAW). It has a few essential instruments and effects. It runs in your browser. From next week, it will have an AI assistant to help you along.

If you want to learn to make music, try making a 4-bar loop in Groove. Then give me feedback. I’m building for you.