A bard's grimoire: 8 AI-composed songs for D&D

Last Friday, I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time in my life. I’ve always been curious to play pen and paper games, but never found the time for it.

Ahmet, our Dungeon Master, was really kind to organize a one-shot quest so I couldn’t say no.

Creating the character

First thing that I had to do was creating a character. Our DM told us to use the D&D Beyond App. As I had no clue about anything, I followed the guided character creation flow. After a few minutes of clicking through things I didn’t completely understand, I finally had my character:

Why a black gnome with silver hair? Why an acolyte? Well, to be honest, those were random choices. But why a bard? Well, if you read my previous posts, you might know that I like music. And that I’ve recently built a tool to use AI to create music for me. It was an obvious choice.

Preparing for the Quest

The morning before the game I was cleaning my apartment while watching a video on how DnD works. During the explanation, the presenter said some people get really into it and show up with their own costumes and props to breathe life into their characters. This inspired me: I wanted to pack my Circuit Tracks as my “magical bard instrument”, but I didn’t have time to compose any meaningful songs myself. So what did I do? I asked Claude to do it for me

Today I'll be playing DND with some friends. My character is a Gnome Bard, Acolyte, and I thought it would be cool to bring my Circuit Tracks with me and have some prepared music.

Your task is to autonomously create 8 different projects, store them from slot indexes 8 to 15 (the whole second row of pads). The projects should have different characters:

- A lullaby style melody, for calming beasts, helping my party rest, etc.
- A fanfare style melody, to celebrate victories!
- A pensive melody, to help focus and concentrate when needed
- A healing melody, to help restore hit points
- A disturbing dissonance melody, to confuse the enemies

You get the idea, you can choose the other styles yourself.

## General style

The idea is that I have a magic arp or device that can make music. The music should sound medieval and fit in the world of DnD.
The synth patches could be different per project.
Don't use drum tracks at all. Keep things simple.

The result? Claude built the following 8 projects and I think they were spot on! The music immediately transported me to the time when I used to play JRPGs like Final Fantasy or Golden Sun, and that’s exactly what I wanted:

How did it go?

I brought my Circuit Tracks to the game and my party did definitely get surprised. I even got an inspiration — or whatever it’s called. I got to use the Victory Horn a few times, killed an undead by using the Dissonant Whispers spell accompanied by Confusion and calmed an NPC with the help of Calm Rest. Of course, I also annoyed some of my party members from time to time with random sounds, but you know, it’s hard to have a flashy synth on your lap all the time and not playing it.

All in all, it was a lot of fun, and I could use my Circuit Tracks MCP project for something meaningful!

Gallery

A little gallery from the session with some AI generated art by Fede and Ahmet: