DARC: Drum accompaniment generation with fine-grained rhythm control

TL;DR

DARC is a novel drum accompaniment generation model that enables fine-grained rhythm control and context-aware music creation by combining conditioning on musical context and explicit rhythm prompts.

Contribution

It introduces a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to augment a state-of-the-art drum generator with detailed rhythm control capabilities.

Findings

Enables precise rhythm control in drum generation.

Maintains musical context awareness during generation.

Improves flexibility over existing methods.

Abstract

In music creation, rapid prototyping is essential for exploring and refining ideas, yet existing generative tools often fall short when users require both structural control and stylistic flexibility. Prior approaches in stem-to-stem generation can condition on other musical stems but offer limited control over rhythm, and timbre-transfer methods allow users to specify specific rhythms, but cannot condition on musical context. We introduce DARC, a generative drum accompaniment model that conditions both on musical context from other stems and explicit rhythm prompts such as beatboxing or tapping tracks. Using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we augment STAGE, a state-of-the-art drum stem generator, with fine-grained rhythm control while maintaining musical context awareness.