Music
The Acid 303 Project is exactly what it sounds like: a deep, sustained investigation into the acid sound — that squelching, resonant, filter-swept bassline that defined Chicago acid house in 1987 and has refused to die ever since. The project uses the Behringer TD-3 as its core voice, pushing the machine's 303-derived circuitry into extreme resonance, pitch-modulated chaos, and controlled melodic lines.
The project blends three distinct influences that turn out to be more compatible than they appear: old-school acid house in its original form, contemporary electro with its mechanical precision and sci-fi palette, and synthwave's cinematic sweep and emotional directness. The result sits somewhere that doesn't have an obvious genre label — which feels like the right place to be.
The full hardware rig drives every production. The Elektron Syntakt handles drums and additional synthesis — its per-track engines let each percussion element be a different synth voice simultaneously. The Roland TR-8S brings classic 808 and 909 samples into the mix alongside its own synthesis engine. The ASM Hydrasynth provides lush, harmonically complex pads and leads with its wave morphing engine, capable of sounds that no subtractive synth can reach.
Everything is sequenced in hardware. Ableton Live handles recording and final arrangement but is not the creative instrument — the hardware rig generates all the material, and the laptop captures it.
Every release under The Acid 303 Project has cover artwork generated through AI image tools. Midjourney has been the primary tool — its understanding of texture, colour, and abstract visual language maps well onto the aesthetic of acid electronics. Prompts are developed iteratively over many generations, treating the process like a collaborative design conversation rather than a single command.
Stable Diffusion with custom fine-tuned models provides additional control when specific visual elements are needed — particular colour palettes, specific types of abstraction, or photorealistic elements composited into generated backgrounds. The combination of both tools gives a much wider range than either alone.
The written language around music releases is often an afterthought — track descriptions, release notes, social posts — but it shapes how listeners approach the music. Claude is used for drafting and refining this copy. The process involves describing the track's mood, its harmonic content, its intended emotional territory, and asking Claude to develop language that does the music justice without being either overclaiming or dismissive. Several rounds of collaborative editing produce copy that reads like a human wrote it — because a human did, working with an AI partner.
LANDR handles automated mastering for quick distribution-ready versions of tracks. Its AI analyses the frequency content, dynamic range, and stereo field of a mix and applies mastering-quality processing to bring it to streaming loudness standards. For final releases, this sits alongside a manual mastering pass using iZotope Ozone's AI Master Assistant, which provides a starting point that's typically closer to the target than starting from a flat chain.
An entirely hardware-driven production setup with AI-assisted artwork and mastering for final output.