A Little Neon Forge of My Own
Not every project is meant to be seen by the world.
Some projects exist simply because they are interesting. Some are experiments, distractions, or little technical obsessions that only need to make sense to the person building them.
This is one of those projects.
Every so often, I am genuinely surprised by what can be done on my own little local machine. Recently, I started experimenting with a private, SUNO-inspired music studio for creating synthwave tracks with AI.
The project uses ACE-Step XL Turbo to generate the actual music. It runs locally in my browser and can produce songs up to two minutes long. The only downside is that it is not exactly lightweight. The model happily consumes around 90% of my available memory while it is working.
Still, watching a complete track appear from a simple description is remarkable.
I can write something like:
A rain-soaked midnight drive through Tokyo, melancholy but hopeful, pulsing analog bass, gated drums, and a huge cinematic chorus.
The system turns that idea into a production prompt, plans the arrangement, generates the instruments, renders the performance, and gives me something I can play back in the browser.
I have also been building in the parts that make the process feel more like a real creative tool:
- Separate production instructions and lyrics
- Male, female, duet, or instrumental options
- AI-written lyrics
- Instruments to exclude
- Controls for weirdness and creative freedom
- A library of previous creations
- Stored prompts, lyrics, metadata, and audio files
- A local player for revisiting old tracks
There is also a second local language model involved. A Mac mini connected on the network runs another LM Studio, where it can act as the creative director: expanding rough ideas, suggesting arrangements, and writing lyrics. ACE-Step then handles the more demanding audio generation.
The whole thing is intentionally private. It is not a product, and I do not plan to release it publicly. It is just a personal studio built around curiosity and the enjoyment of making something that did not exist before.
That is probably my favorite kind of project: not necessarily useful to anyone else, but useful enough to me that I keep coming back to it.
For now, Neon Forge is just a small local experiment, a hungry music model, and a growing archive of strange little synthwave songs.
And honestly, that is more than enough.