Replacing the bass from an Udio song with Kee Bass
This article on using Udio and Martinic plugins together was written for the blog at Martinic. I repost it here with permission, and encourage you to check out Martinic’s awesome plugins! Also – notification: I sometimes use affiliate links. Some purchases may earn me a commission! 🙂
In case you’ve been living under a rock, AI music generation is here and it’s already pretty amazing. Udio is already making waves even though it’s still in beta. Although it won’t replace us producers any time soon, it is a great way to serve up new ideas.
But, since Udio spits out fully mixed tracks that aren’t complete songs, we need to get under the hood and manipulate the sounds, rearrange, and do what producers do. That’s why we thought of using Udio and Martinic plugins together.
So we thought we’d try just that, and what better way to start than by replacing the bass line from an Udio song with Kee Bass, our free emulation of the classic physical Kee Bass synth?
And since Kee Bass is now free and Udio is free (for now!), we thought we’d tackle this with all free tools. Let’s go!
Using Udio and Martinic plugins together: Overview
Before we get into the detail, let’s get an overview of our steps:
- Create a song with Udio.
- Download the audio.
- Separate into 4 tracks (drums, bass, vocals, everything else) with OpenVINO in Audacity.
- Use Spotify Basic Pitch to create MIDI from the bass audio.
- Import the audio tracks (except bass) into your favorite DAW.
- Import the bass MIDI and attach it to an instance of Kee Bass.
- Pick an awesome patch, manipulate it, and voila!
That’s it! Let’s drill down.
Step 1 – Create the Song
First, let’s create a song in Udio. This is easy – just go to Udio.com and create a free account. From there, just type a prompt and hit “create”. Udio will churn for a minute or two and spit out two variations. You can choose whether to have vocals or just instrumental, and whether to use lyrics you wrote or generate them.
You can go crazy with your prompts, specifying genre, style, tempo, anything. Technically, Udio won’t do renderings of famous artists’ voices – instead, it will give you a warning and replace that part with descriptive words. In reality, though, the resulting songs are eerily close to what the artist might do.
I found myself experimenting a lot with different prompts, and since you’re allowed 600 generations a month, you can prompt to your heart’s content.
Once you’ve got something you like, you can remix or extend, massaging the track until it’s what you want. Now you’ll just need the audio. Click the three dots on the right side of your track and pick “Download”. You’ll get an MP3 which you can save wherever you want.
Here’s the one I settled on:
Step 2 – Separate the Tracks
First, Get OpenVINO
Next, we’ll use another free AI tool called OpenVINO to separate tracks. This is an Audacity plugin, so if you don’t already have Audacity, you can grab it here. Make sure you’ve got version 3.5.1, since the latest version of OpenVINO is only compatible with the latest version of Audacity.
Once Audacity is up to date, install OpenVINO and restart Audacity.
Important: Despite the instructions on the OpenVINO page, you will not see OpenVINO in your effects list right away. First, you have to enable the module in Audacity by going to edit->preferences->modules, then restarting Audacity. The OpenVINO installer will remind you of this, but if you’re like me, you’ll walk off to get a drink and miss it.
Next, Import the Song
Now just drag the new MP3 into Audacity. Select the whole project (ctrl-A) and go to effect->OpenVINO AI Effects->OpenVINO Music Separation.
You’ll want to pick “4 Stem” under separation mode.
Now you can remove the original track and export the separated tracks by going to file->export audio (choose computer) and under “export range” choose multiple files.
Here’s my separated tracks:
GrooveJunction-OtherInstruments.wav
Let’s look another one I tried too, because something really notable about OpenVINO is how well it extracts vocals – here’s “Vault The Flames”:
The original Udio track:
The separations:
VaultTheFlames-Instruments.wav
Step 3 – Audio to MIDI
Now that you’ve got separated audio of all your tracks, you can create a MIDI file of the bass. Browse to https://basicpitch.spotify.com/ and simply drag your bass audio file into the window. It will process for a minute or two.
If you scroll down to “show MIDI adjustments”, you’ll find several parameters you can adjust to make the translation more accurate. You can play back the MIDI and the audio (separately) to compare and when you’re satisfied, hit “download MIDI”.
Let’s look at another one we tried, “Bassline Chasers”:
The original:
The Udio bass:
And the Kee Bass:
Now you’re ready to import into your favorite DAW!
Step 4 – Your DAW
Now all you have to do is import the audio files (minus bass) and the new bass MIDI file into your DAW. Pull up a new soft synth, select Key Bass, and copy or send the bass MIDI to it.
Now all you have to do is play with Kee Bass until you have the sound and groove you want and voila, a fresh bass line, written by Udio and replaced with Kee Bass by you!
From there, you can go crazy and make a song!
For my part, I threw away the “other instruments” and the AI-generated vocals (which weren’t much in “Groove Junction”), and decided to go crazy with the AX73 plugin and write some lyrics. Let’s hear what my new bassline and drums sound like, so you can really hear how the Kee Bass replaced the original bass:
ajt-way-too-long-drumsAndBass.wav
You can download the whole resulting song for free from my website here: Way Too Long.
Things to Watch Out For
I did this process a few times and there are a couple of problems you could run into:
- Be sure you enable the OpenVINO module in Audacity – this tripped me up for a long time. The first time through, I actually separated the audio using FL Studio’s “stem separation”, which works just like OpenVINO.
- Some songs lend themselves better to stem separation better than others. It’s better if the song has a clear bassline that you can really pick out. If you can’t pick it out, it’s likely the AI can’t either. A couple of my tries had basically nothing in the bass track after separation.
- Similarly, Spotify Basic Pitch (and any audio-to-MIDI app) could have problems getting things right on bass tracks, especially when the bass is particularly low. You’ll want to play with the MIDI adjustments and you may even need to choose another Udio song with a clearer bass line. I actually tried several songs and several free audio-to-MIDI converters. The best results were with Spotify Basic Pitch and Cakewalk, with a more well-defined bass line.
Some Pro Tips:
- Before you import tracks into your DAW, find out the BPM of your Udio track by using any free BPM detector, like Audio Alter’s or Tunebat’s. You’ll need this to set the DAW tempo so the MIDI file will line up.
- Speaking of tempo, Udio doesn’t always output at a round tempo. For example, for my Groove Junction example, I had to tweak it a bit, finally settling on 114.30 BPM (even though Audio Alter reported 114 as the BPM).
- Udio also doesn’t always export the song lined up right on the beat. There’s usually a bit of silence at the beginning, so you may have to turn off snap in your DAW and manually drag the track to the right place.
- Udio also may export the song starting in the middle of a bar – count it out and find the down beat – you might find that you’ve got a pick up at the beginning.
Now You Try It!
Udio is definitely an interesting new tool. As a music maker I love anything that causes me to come up with something I wouldn’t have – and “Way Too Long” is certainly a departure for me!
Combined with some super-sick Martinic plugins, this was a fun project and I plan on taking advantage of this process again!
I’m a producer and artist who loves all things production, writes for many trades, and can’t get enough of AX73, Kee Bass, and Scanner Vibrato. Talk to me about it all on social media @RecordingLikeMacGyver!
AND if you want to instantly improve your tracks without buying anything new, grab the 10x Your Tracks eBook!