Roland enters generative AI music with Melody Flip

The plug-in offers around 250 “Palettes,” which are themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. Users can start from scratch and ask Melody Flip to generate a melody, chord progression, bassline, drums, or any combination of those elements, or they can feed it a reference track and have it work from the melodic ideas in that audio.

What comes out is not a polished song with vocals and a complete arrangement in the way Suno or Udio output finished music. Melody Flip instead returns simple musical loops. Control over the results is fairly limited: there is no text prompt for describing vocals or style nuances. Users choose a genre, note density, tempo, and musical key, then accept what the tool generates. The genre list is detailed, ranging from “80s disco” and “90s R&B” to “Kawaii Future Bass” and “Anime World.”

The built-in sounds are also a sign the output is not meant to be used as-is. Most presets resemble the general MIDI tones found in 1990s video games. Roland appears to expect customers to export the MIDI data from Melody Flip into a DAW and reshape it with other, more powerful synth plug-ins.

The report notes that Roland had recently been recovering from years of missteps, including a confusing Roland Cloud subscription service, with well-received products such as the P-6 Creative Sampler, SH-4d, Gaia 2, and TR-1000. But given how the music community has typically responded to generative AI tools, The Verge says Melody Flip is unlikely to bring the company much goodwill.