Accusonus Rhythmiq – AI based Drum VST

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Accusonus released a new AI-based plug-in for electronic musicians, producers and DJs. Accusonus Rhythmiq allows you to re-shape your loops in real time and improvise with them while performing live. It’s like that cool producer friend, who takes what you came up with and plays around with it.

What sets Rhythmiq apart is, that it analyzes and understands your beats (for the most part) and instantly allows you to create new variations of it. All you need is turn one knob – which is midi mappable – and you can generate pattern variations, for instantly playable breaks, fills and build-ups. When producing, there’s so much to control – you don’t want another plugin with a hundred different buttons. Sometimes it’s great that you can make spontaneous decisions and stay in the flow. When you enable the A.I. Beat Assistant and let it perform in real-time, it’s not completely random though! Obviously you can tell it how much variability you want for arrangement, silence or reverses.

The whole layout is pretty straightforward, so after I checked out the presets, it was time to explore…

Instant Game Over!

Let’s drop classic drum breaks into Accusonus Rhythmiq. How about the Amen Break? Let’s tweak a few of the parameters in the beat assistant and hit play. You instantly have a recognizable but unique and evolving sound bed for your next Jungle or Drum’n’Bass track! No more micro-chopping breaks or trying to filter out the kick, so you can use the break as a top layer. Simply load it into Rhythmiq, let it process the break to extract stems and tweak the beat assistant to your liking.

Now for less breakbeat orientated music, we can also load up percussion loops. How about a vanilla percussion loop which has a few different instruments in it. Maybe you find it boring or you have used it in the last three tracks already. Time to spice it up! Load it up into Rhythmiq and get your own personalised version. You can get by with a handful of percussion loops you really like and spin up infinite versions from it. Granted they won’t sound how a real percussionist will play them, but if you are open for happy accidents, this plugin speeds up your workflow by an insane amount.

And while it’s best suited for drums and percussion, even melody loops can be loaded in and tweaked by the AI, even though it gets quite choppy quickly. You will experience a new way to jam with your beats and find inspiration.

I also loaded up some of my finished beats and let the A.I. jam with them. It’s not yet an automated way to perform your beats live, but if you have your drum stems loaded into Rhythmiq, no finger drumming is required to pull off some really dope tricks and transitions by simply turning one knob on your midi controller!

Verdict?

Rhythmiq has a really cool concept and it’s executed well. No, it is not perfect yet and the results you get from it, depend on the source material. Some things seem to work like magic with it, other loops I just couldn’t get results I had hoped for. But I keep coming back to this VST to generate breaks, fills and build-ups from the same beat or layered stems. I hope Accusonus will improve the algorithm further, because I want to use it on more material ASAP!