What Aether Generates
Two generators in one window: Melodic writes chords, basslines, melodies and arrangements as MIDI layers; Drums writes beats. What each can and cannot do.
DocumentationWhat Aether Generates
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What Aether Generates
Aether is two generators behind one window. Melodic writes the melodic and harmonic material of a track: chords, basslines, melodies, counter-lines, pads, arpeggios and full multi-section arrangements built from them. Drums writes beats. They are separate musical brains with separate prompts, separate controls and separate clips, and neither one does the other's job.
Both write MIDI, not audio. Everything you get back is notes: re-voice them, edit them, and route them to any instrument you like. Nothing Aether produces is a rendered sound file, and nothing it produces is locked to the instrument it was auditioned on.
The two tabs at a glance
| Melodic | Drums | |
|---|---|---|
| Writes | Chords, basslines, melodies, leads, pads, comps, arpeggios, ostinatos, multi-section arrangements | Beats: kick, snare, hats, toms, cymbals and percussion |
| You steer it with | Key, scale, tempo, genre, mood, instrumentation | Groove, feel, density, fills, pieces, tempo |
| Comes back as | Named, instrument-tagged layers | Named pieces on kit lanes |
| Who picks the pitches | The AI writes the notes | Aether assigns every pitch; the AI only names pieces |
| Channel | One per layer, never 10 automatically | Always channel 10 |
| Auditions through | A bundled sampled piano | One of three bundled drum kits |
Neither tab drifts into the other's job
This is the single most useful thing to know before your first prompt. Ask the Melodic tab for a beat, a drum loop or a percussion part and it will not produce one. That is not a limitation of the model you picked or a sign that something is broken. Beats come from the Drums tab, and the two never see each other's output.
The Melodic tab does still think about your drums. Ask for drum and bass and it writes a bassline that leaves room for a breakbeat; ask for house and it places chord stabs off the beat because it knows a four-on-the-floor kick is coming. It is writing around a rhythm section it expects to come from somewhere else, whether that is the Drums tab or your own samples, which is why the results tend to sit properly in a mix once the drums are under them.
What comes back from the Melodic tab
Every part comes back as a named, instrument-tagged layer, so a request for a horn section under a piano gives you two separable parts rather than one merged stream. See Composing in Layers for what you can do with them.
The AI chooses each part's instrument and names it, so you get a Rhodes or a Pizzicato Strings rather than a generic "lead". Aether then matches that name to the closest General MIDI sound so the tag stays consistent through playback, the Layers view and export, where it becomes the track name your DAW shows.
What comes back from the Drums tab
A beat comes back as named pieces on kit lanes, one row per piece. The model never picks a note number: it names pieces like kick and closed hat, and Aether assigns every pitch from the MIDI map. That is what makes a beat land correctly on a Drum Rack without you moving anything, and it is why a beat can be relabelled onto a different pad layout later without regenerating it.
Every drum export is pinned to channel 10, the General MIDI percussion channel. See The Drums Tab for kits, styles, live controls and importing your own loop.
A tag is not a sound
Playback inside Aether is an audition, not the final instrument. The Melodic tab auditions through a bundled sampled piano whatever the layer is tagged as, so a part named Rhodes still previews on piano. The Drums tab auditions through one of three bundled kits, chosen from the Sound control, and translates the beat's note numbers so the right drum sounds whatever pad layout the file is written for.
In both cases the audition changes nothing about the MIDI. The instrument tag matters at export, where it becomes a track name; the drum Sound never leaves the plugin at all.
What Aether does not write
- ●Audio of any kind. Aether writes MIDI, and the preview is an audition rather than a render.
- ●Vocals or lyrics.
- ●Mix, effects or automation.
- ●Tempo or key changes inside a single clip. Generate the next part separately.
- ●Drums from the Melodic tab, or melodic parts from the Drums tab.
Practical limits
- ●Clip length runs from 1 to 64 bars on both tabs, and leaving Bars empty lets the AI choose. For anything longer, generate sections and assemble them in your DAW.
- ●A single generation is capped at 10,000 notes, which is far beyond a normal arrangement and exists to stop a runaway response.
- ●One key and one tempo per clip.
- ●Aether generates in passes rather than continuously; each request returns a complete clip rather than streaming notes as it goes.
- ●Batch turns one prompt into 2 to 5 variations on either tab, and Pro Mode doubles the calls per variation, so five variations in Pro Mode is ten calls.
If you asked the Melodic tab for drums anyway
You will usually get the melodic and harmonic parts of the request fulfilled and the percussion silently left out, rather than an error. If a generation came back lighter than you expected, check whether the missing part was a drum part; that is the most common reason. Ask the Drums tab for it instead, in its own words: it takes a groove, a feel and a density rather than a key and a scale.
Questions