‘sup. I’m Dave – one of the founders of Rifle.
I’ve been making music my whole life and I’m telling you man, we’ve lost the plot.
For years my co-founder and I faced the persecution of tools designed by engineers, not for the kid who plays three instruments by ear and freezes the other, he opens up a DAW, not for the singer with a hundred tunes in his head and zero songs, not for any of us who only had music in us and wanted to end it.
No one solved the problem
A consumer-grade music creation tool has never been made for people who are actually musical. DAWs are powerful, sure, but they give you a cockpit when all you wanted to do was play. And then text-to-music AI companies appear and go even further in the wrong direction and take the wheel completely. From a text prompt, they generate statistically averaged songs trained on billions of hours of human expression that contain your or your unique taste, your particular sadness, or your particular happiness — irresistible stuff.
We are opposites. We believe in authorship. We believe that music is the crudest, oldest, most communal form of human expression. It’s always been about people first and tools second, and somewhere in the last few decades that’s reversed. We just want to reverse it.
The rifle is the playground we’ve always needed.
The rifle is a playground. An ecosystem for creating music on the web – sounds, samples, instruments, simple tools, real-time collaboration, and just the right amount of AI acting as a sous chef in the background – it’s brilliant and present and knows exactly when to step in and when to disappear – so you can live in a state of flow, that beautiful and messy state where your idea doesn’t stop, learn something, be you. only to make.
This is early. Genuinely, honestly, brilliantly primitive. There are bugs, there are missing pieces, things we haven’t figured out yet. But this is the first version of something we’ve really needed for a long time. So use it. break it Send this to a musical friend who is sitting on a hundred ideas.