Hand skills + AI tools for art, music & games. Hand-picked tools, honest training & pricing info, and how real creators work. Free weekly newsletter ⬇️
A little about me:
I've been a musician my whole life. My mom still performs to this day, and my dad was a producer with a home studio. Most nights I fell asleep in front of a kick drum, and honestly, the noise never bothered me. It put me to sleep.
Music has always been my passion.
But I also work a day job with brutal hours, six to seven days a week, so time to create is always hard to find.
Mission:
Over the past couple of years I found AI tools and embraced them. They've made it a lot easier to keep doing what I love with the little time I have, and I know I'm not alone in that.
The more I talked with people and learned about new tools, the more I realized there are so many out there that you'll never see them all.
That's why I created BrushBeatByte: a directory of creative tools across the arts that's easy to browse, easy to navigate, and easy to learn from, so you can find things you'd never stumble across on your own.
Finding these tools is a joy, and sharing them with you is even better.
Disclaimer:
I'm not affiliated with any of them. It's just easy mode for busy artists like me, because I want all of us to have access to everything that's out there.
Thank you for joining me on this. 🎨🎵🎮
Issue #2 is live 🎨🎵🎮
What's new: 8 hybrid picks, including Loopcloud 8, DYSEKT and Krea for Blender.
What's good: four free, open-source tools that run right on your own machine, for sound QA, reference search, toon shading and game audio.
What rocks: David Salle trained an AI on his own paintings, then went at the results in oil. The machine doesn't paint a thing. That's hybrid.
Link below 👇
Saturday creative check-in 🎨🎵🎮
After a long week at the day job, what tool are you leaning on this weekend to get your art, music or game moving?
Drop your favorite below. Hand-made, AI-assisted or both, they all count. The best finds might end up in the BrushBeatByte directory 👇
Issue #2 drops tomorrow 👀
More tools, more ideas, and more of that AI-plus-human-hands energy for artists who don't have all day to dig through what's out there.
If you're not on the list yet, tonight's your chance. Link below 👇
Hot take: AI didn't kill art. It gave artists a new tool.
The best stuff out there right now is hybrid: hand-drawn plus AI, a real player plus synths, game devs mixing pixels and prompts.
BrushBeatByte is a free weekly roundup of the tools, the honest pricing, and the real creators doing it.
Hand skills + AI tools. Both, not either.
What's in your hybrid workflow? 👇
@xMaple_Catx Totally agree games need the human touch. That's the point of hybrid workflows: humans set the vision and make the calls, and AI helps with the grind. Disclosure plus real craft is the fair middle ground.
@troygentic@TimSweeneyEpic Love this. AI-assisted doesn't mean low effort. The vision, the design calls and the late nights are still all you. Keep building, and keep showing your process 🎮
@VideoGameHstry It's crazy how real it looked on release. Then the tech kept evolving, and what once looked real doesn't anymore. Now it carries a different aesthetic, a retro one, and that has its own appeal.
Keep building, my friends.
The sketch nobody liked. The beat that's still half done. The game with one working level.
Every hybrid creator you admire started right there, with one tool, one idea, and a stubborn streak.
AI can speed up the work, but you're still the one who keeps showing up. 🎨🎵🎮
Brush. Beat. Byte. 🎨🎵🎮
Painters, producers and game makers who mix AI with their own hands, this is your corner.
Show us your hybrid workflow: what's AI, what's you, and where they meet. Drop it below, and we might feature it in an upcoming issue. 👇