claudewave

A Claude Code skill for building vaporwave/slushwave/citypop/chillwave remixes and sound-reactive ASCII music videos of existing songs.

Claude handles the whole pipeline: stem separation, per-instrument MIDI transcription, beat-tracked arrangement, programmatic synth rebuild, genre-specific DSP, and 1080p60 ASCII visualizers with per-song reflections.

What it does

Given an mp3/wav, Claude will:

1. Separate it into 4 stems (demucs).
2. Transcribe bass + harmonic instruments to MIDI (basic-pitch) for pitch/chord info.
3. Beat-track the original for the rhythm grid.
4. Detect chord progression (including jazz extensions).
5. (Optional) Generate AI atmosphere pads + m2m vocal style transfer via a local ComfyUI server with ACE-Step.
6. (Optional) Extract monophonic melodies (whistle/lead) with pYIN.
7. Rebuild the track with programmatic synth voices (FM Rhodes, slap bass, sub, bell, Juno pad, whistle, vocoder).
8. Apply genre-specific DSP (chorus/phaser/reverb/tape wobble/sidechain pump/chopped hook loops).
9. Render a 1080p60 ASCII music video with scene visuals + a reflection panel with AI/lyric-related commentary.
10. Mux the final video with MP3-in-MP4 for broad compatibility.

Install

See setup.md for full install commands. Summary:

• ffmpeg (with libx264, libmp3lame, optionally h264_nvenc for GPU encode)
• Python 3.13 main env: librosa soundfile scipy numpy pedalboard demucs Pillow music21
• Python 3.12 side env (for basic-pitch which has deps that don't build on 3.13): basic-pitch onnxruntime pretty_midi librosa soundfile scipy
• Optional: a local ComfyUI server at 127.0.0.1:8188 with ace_step_1.5_turbo_aio.safetensors and ace_step_v1_3.5b.safetensors for AI music generation

Use

Add the skill directory to Claude Code's skills path, then just ask:

make a slushwave remix of this track with a music video

turn this into a citypop cover

vaporwave this, use the chorus line as an eccojam loop

build a sound-reactive ASCII visualizer for this song

Claude will work through the pipeline with you, previewing intermediate results and iterating based on feedback.

Subgenre guide

See SKILL.md for the full subgenre quick-reference table. Rough guidance on matching sources to treatments:

• slushwave — extreme slowdown, drifting, for ambient/new-age sources
• classic vaporwave — chopped & screwed, for smooth jazz / 80s R&B / synth-pop
• eccojams — hypnotic single-phrase loops
• mallsoft — cavernous spacious ambient, for lounge / easy listening
• future funk — upbeat, for disco / soul / city pop
• citypop (claudewave) — clean, polished, FM Rhodes + slap bass, for any melodic song
• chillwave / dreampop — warm nostalgic, for folk / indie

Credits

Created through iterative collaboration with Claude (Opus 4.7) on a couple of songs. The patterns and pitfalls in this skill are hard-won from that session.

Research sources and credits in SKILL.md.

License: MIT.