JD Beckinator 3000

This is a generative music system I first designed for the versus-fighting game prototype made at Redhill Games, Horizon Break.

I had wanted to try making generative drum and bass/modern jazz drums à la JD Beck for a while and that game project seemed like a nice opportunity for that. I should mention that the idea came to me when watching this great video by the Side Brain YouTube channel showing the new Rhythm Generative Tool in Ableton (Programming JD Beck Style Drums with Ableton Live 12 New Rhythm Generative Tool).

After Redhill, I decided to continue working on the music system for a few weeks. I dropped the Himalayan vibe (which did not make sense without the context of the game) and only kept the JD Beck-style drums. Then, I prototyped different ways to add chords on top of the drums. I also made a simple UI to easily showcase the music.

This music system uses the Harmonix plugin for Unreal and the drum samples were made by Kirill Yurchev. I had many discussions with him about how to design the music for the game.

The fancy legs are just a silly way to show a simple application of audio-driven visuals. They were drawn by my partner, Miina Markkanen, and are a sneak peek of another project we are working on.

More info about the project here: https://martinbussy.com/horizon-break-and-its-generative-music/

---

With the rise of machine-learning-based systems to generate new content based on existing content (generative AI), I feel it is important to mention that this project has nothing to do with machine learning. The whole system is human-designed.