Short answer: Jordan Metzner says his tool has two decks with multiple channels, master effects and an AI button that writes new Strudel beats. He built it mostly with OpenAI Codex and says it would otherwise have been a heavy, expensive build.
Watch this answer from Episode 11 (starts at 5:08) · Episode 11 notes and transcript
From Episode 11: Coding the Beat: Strudel, Claude Dashboards & OpenAI’s $1B Play, starting at 5:08.
Jordan Metzner [5:08]: Yeah. So I love using Ableton Live and Ableton to produce music, and I've been DJing since I was a little kid. I think I first got turntables when I was, like, 10 or 12 years old. So I love to make music and to produce music. And so I wanted to make something that was kind of like Algoriddim djay Pro 2, and a combination of Ableton, and this is when I built. So I don't have a good name. I just called it Strudel. It's like the name of the library. But what you can see here is I have a two deck mixer, and you can actually mix between kind of deck one and deck two. Each deck has different multiple channels on it. On each deck, there's actually like a sub channel mixer between a and b that you can kind of manipulate here down below and selecting the channels. It's got a bunch of additional master effects and features, synchronization. The coolest feature, it has AI. So, all of these channels have some AI code behind them or have regular code behind them, Strudel code. And the AI button will help us, like, write new beats.
Jordan Metzner [6:09]: So let's see if this works right. It might be a little buggy, but hopefully, it'll all work. So we should be able to get some techno music here. Let's see. Alright. And I didn't promise it'd be like amazing techno music. So, here's the drums and I could, increase the delay. Immediately, you should start to hear, you kinda have the drums picking it up there a little bit. And since the drums are on channel a, I can kinda mix it between channel a and drive it all the way down channel b where there's no drums. Got it. Right? So there's the mix. But now, know, what we can do is hopefully hit these drums and change the b on them, like, in the AI button. So every time I hit AI, I'm getting a different version. And I kinda change the sounds that it's using. I guess every time I hit AI, it resets it again. But you could see here it's creating different beats. And then, we could basically apply those and you can do this across the whole stack. So you can start to make the whole song sound different.
Jordan Metzner [7:38]: And you can keep going across the stack. So, it's just the beginning early days. I think we've talked about in the past that we've used, you know oh, there we go. We've talked about in the past that we've used things like Suno to produce music, but this is another type of, like, music production. Just another way to leverage LLMs, JavaScript, React. I think I used mostly Claude. Actually, I think I used mostly OpenAI Codex to build this. I think, I could have never built something so dynamic, so progressive without the use of LLMs. This would have been a very, very heavy and expensive development cycle to build something so complex. And, yeah, while it's just the beginning, I think this type of libraries, these Strudel libraries and others like it will allow, the LLMs to continue to help people make cool stuff, like, in this case, music. You know?
