Recently I am studying music production and playing around with Ableton Live 11. As a first step, I am dwelling into subtractive sound synthesis and trying to recreate well-known sounds from scratch as an exercise for refining my hear and technique (with very rough results at the moment!).

At some point I had the enlightenment: why not asking ChatGPT to recreate a famous sound?
Indeed, as of now I saw that many people are using ChatGPT for all kinds of weird tasks, such as generating workout plans, crafting trivia questions, etc. So, why not asking ChatGPT to generate a configuration of a substractive sound synthesizer for generating the uber-famous sound of the intro of Jump by Van Halen?

Trivia moment: probably, not many people know that Eddie Van Halen, despite he had most of their success as an American band, is actually born in Amsterdam 🙂

Anyway, let’s go back to the task. First things first, let’s hear the actual original sound that we want to recreate. Listen to it by playing the video below.

The, I fired up my ChatGPT instance (specifically, GPT-3.5 – May 3 version) and asked the following prompt: Acting as a musician expert in playing synthesizers based on subtractive sound synthesis. What is the configuration of a synth for making the sound of the intro of the song Jump by Van Halen?

Bare with me if I did not go very deep into properly engineering the prompt, but…hey…this is a first experiment! Here is the reply by ChatGPT.

Here the first aspect that stroke me was the level of detail of the answer by ChatGPT, it actually has an idea about what is subtractive sound synthesis, what an oscillator is, the usage of envelopes, and effects! To me this was already surprising, but the best is yet to come…

As a good pupil, I launched my Ableton Live 11 instance and followed as much as I would the instructions provided by ChatGPT. By reading here, I knew that the intro of the Jump song is played using an Oberheim OB-X historic synthesizer.
Luckily, a very good emulator for the Oberheim OB-X exists and it can be loaded into Ableton Live as any other VST plugins. It is the OB-Xd Virtual Synthesizer, developed by DiscoDSP (and also available as an open source project on GitHub).
Below you can see a screenshot of the OB-Xd synthesizer loaded in Ableton Live and configured according to the instructions of ChatGPT (I had to interpret some of them, but I believe that we are close enough). In order to give a bit of more realism to the produced sound, I also equalized a bit the sound by pushing more on the lower and higher frequencies.

So, how does it sound? Check it out here.

To be honest, it is not good 🙂 It is clunky, not deep, and for sure it does not meet the quality bar to be used in a live or professional setup.
However, it is not a disaster. Given that intuitively (and shamelessly simplifying) ChatGPT simply tries to concatenate the words that are statistically more probable to make up a correct answer, I was expecting some kind of random weird sound. This did not happen at all, even though the initially-generated configuration of course is not perfect. I believe that the initially-generated configuration can be used as a good-enough starting point.

The synth configuration generated by ChatGPT is not perfect, but it can be used as a good-enough starting point

If you play yourself with the generated sound and with the intro of the song in general, here you can find the Ableton Live Project containing a MIDI track with the intro of the song played using the OB-Xd virtual synthesizer, enjoy!