Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.It’s not quite the “push button; get song” of Suno, but Roland’s new Melody Flip tool marks the company’s foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 “Palettes,” which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from scratch and ask it to generate any combination of melody, chord progression, bassline, or drums. Or you can feed it a reference track and have it build off the melodic ideas from that.Unlike Suno or Udio, Melody Flip doesn’t spit out fully polished songs with vocals and full arrangements. Instead, it offers simple musical loops meant to serve as a creative spark for you to build on. There are fairly limited control over the outputs. You can’t feed Melody Flip a text prompt like “acoustic country rock with clean male vocals, literate singer-songwriter, gentle brushed drums, and sparse pedal steel at 98BPM” and get a Jason Isbell ripoff. Instead, you basically just choose a genre, note density, BPM, musical key, and take what you get. Though the genre options are pretty fine-grained, going from standard fare like “80s disco” and “90s R&B” to esoteric things like “Kawaii Future Bass” and “Anime World.”The sound selection is further proof that you’re not supposed to use Melody Flip outputs out of the box. The presets available are mostly the sort of general MIDI tones you’d find in ‘90s video games. It seems like the intended use is to export the MIDI data from Melody Flip directly into your DAW to manipulate and pair with other, more powerful synth plugins.After years of seeming lost in the woods and alienating customers with its messy Roland Cloud subscription service, the company was back on track recently. The P-6 Creative Sampler, SH-4d, and Gaia 2 synth all addressed major issues with the company’s lineup. And Roland finally listened to customers last year, paying loving tribute to its analog heritage with the TR-1000. But considering the general response from the music community to generative AI, Melody Flip is unlikely to garner it much goodwill.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Terrence O'Brien