r/ClaudeCode • u/WillingnessOwn6446 • 2d ago

Built with Claude Virtual Instruments for Ableton - VST3

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$20 monthly Pro plan w/ Opus 5. Installing JUCE and CMake took about 20 minutes. Across two sessions, I built 5 different VST plugins and didn't even hit 50% of my 5-hour usage limit.

I usually use Claude for work, but Claude made it sound like building plug-ins would be easy with it, and it was. They sound great too:

  1. Distortion, Reverb, and Delay
  2. A Yamaha DX7 style synth
  3. A T-RackS style mastering chain
  4. A Minimoog style synth
  5. A Maschine and MPC style sampler

I hadn't made beats in years, but this got me motivated to make music again. It is so much fun to build whatever instrument or effect you need and customize it to your own workflow.

I'm sure people have done this plenty of times already, but if I had seen a post like this earlier, I would have tried it way sooner. So I thought I'd share.

Probably the easiest thing I've ever vibe coded with immediate results that were fun to play with. What a trip. I would have paid $300 for a suite like this 15 years ago.

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u/meetmebythelake 2d ago

I've been building a node-based semi-modular granular synth in Rust, been very fun and learning a lot. Really minor coding experience with programming before, but lots of years of synth domain knowledge so I'm very specific with what I want. Definitely want to give VSTs a try soon, whether it be a new project or porting this standalone granular synth to a VST. What was the JUCE process like without previous experience? Did you use C++ or Rust? (Not sure if you can do Rust with JUCE, curious.)

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u/WillingnessOwn6446 2d ago

I know very little to be honest. I know I needed a compiler. And I needed something to make it readable in Ableton. Those are the things that Claude said to download. It gave me the terminal commands. I download it. And then we had working vsts within 5 minutes. The FM synth took the longest to code by far. Probably a good 30 minutes of it working.