I’ve tested Waves Illugen, the Gen AI sample plugin — I’m impressed and concernedBasic: $8/month
Premium: $13/month
Pro: $20/month
waves.com
Picture the scene: you’ve come up with a gorgeous melodic and harmonic hook, and have imagined a perfect beat to complement it, but that beat will only work if the snare sound is just right. A hunt through various sample libraries ensues.

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But the snares you’re finding are either insufficiently icy or entirely the wrong shade of mauve (you’ll see where I’m going with this). Worse still, the longer you spend trawling through samples, the less sure you become about what you were looking for in the first place, and the less enthused you feel about that original spark of inspiration.
What if you could just describe the sound or sample that you want and then have it presented to you? Why, then, you must either be a super-successful producer with a team of studio assistants at your beck and call, or you must be using Waves Illugen.
What is Waves Illugen?
Illugen is a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered, text-to-sound engine. You choose whether you want a one-shot, loop or special/sound effect (SFX), type in an imaginative descriptive phrase such as “A kick so huge that it’ll cause earthquakes”, and a few moments later, Illugen offers up three samples inspired by your prompt.

These sounds aren’t just samples pulled from a library by a clever keyword-driven search engine, but are created on demand and on the fly by Illugen’s generative AI. Sure, this has been trained on a vast library of pre-existing sounds, beats and styles, so there will be abstracted elements of other samples within its creations. I’ll elaborate on this shortly, but this, of course, raises concerns about the morals and wisdom of using a tool that is feeding off the creativity of others.
Illugen runs as a standalone app, but the samples it produces can be dragged from the app into most DAWs, and are stored locally on your computer. They also remain accessible for six months from your Waves account.
Illugen thinking phase. Image: Press
Does Waves Illugen work?
The sounds you get from Illugen depend heavily on how you structure the text that you enter and how well the AI interprets that text. Waves provides a helpful set of examples showing the phrase structures that Illugen best understands. However, those structures differ for each sound type, and trying to remember all the variations isn’t easy. Some sort of crib sheet within the Illugen app would therefore be welcome.
Illugen’s results don’t always hit the mark, but, in theory, should improve over time, both in understanding your specific phrases and a general understanding of what people mean by certain words and terms. Key to this is the ability to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down reaction to the three results it presents and, in so doing, help Illugen learn what you like and what may be meant by the words you’ve entered.
Results are better when the AI gets your meaning, and some of what it thinks up can be surprisingly inspirational. Unfortunately, though, there’s often a grainy, processed quality to what it produces, similar to the sonic artefacts heard in other AI-powered processes such as stem separation and noise reduction, and at times coupled with the artefacts associated with pitch and time processing.

Sometimes this audible patina adds positively to a sound, but it can often make it less usable. More to the point, the ability to hear what the AI is doing (in terms of potentially adapting pre-existing audio) raises questions in my mind about just how original and unique Illugen’s creations are..
Side-stepping the moral minefield, another thing I notice, especially when creating loops and SFX, is that everything Illugen produces is disjointed. So, for example, the AI may produce a nice loop that works perfectly in a track, but if you want the same sounds to play a different sequence or pattern – switching from verse to chorus, for example – the option doesn’t exist. The same criticism can be poked at most uses of samples in music, of course, and, in any event, Waves is looking into allowing Illugen to modify sounds it has previously created for you.
What does Illugen cost?
Illugen is offered at three monthly subscription rates, each providing a different number of monthly credits: 150 for $7.99 per month, 300 for $12.99 per month, or 600 for $19.99 per month. Credits are spent each time you ask Illugen to process a phrase and suggest its results: one credit for a one-shot, two credits for a loop, and between one and three credits for SFX, depending on whether you want a short, medium or long sound.
I tend to dislike subscription-based software-as-a-service offerings, but can forgive it here because, being a cloud-based AI, there’s a direct cost associated with each request the system handles.
If you don’t like Illugen’s results, then unlucky — you’ve spent those credits and you aren’t getting them back. I was using credits supplied by Waves to explore the system but, had I paid for those credits, I’d have been more unhappy that I’d wasted credits when the results were disappointing. It’s a bit like a low-level bet or a loot box in a game.
That said, with each request serving up three samples, all of which are yours to keep and use in your music forever, irrespective of your subscription status, the pricing is not at all unreasonable. In fact, even on the lowest tier, we’re looking at less than $0.04 per loop and below $0.02 per one-shot, so the value is actually rather decent. Waves even rolls over any unused credits from month to month, so you don’t lose anything if you have a few months when you don’t use the system much.

Illugen phrase entry. Image: Press
Is Waves Illugen for me?
During testing, Illugen comes up with incredibly useful results that help me move forward quickly with an idea while inspiring a couple of new ideas along the way. It also produces its fair share of duds. As mentioned, results will largely depend on your prompts, and sounds will likely contain some undesirable artefacts.
I have concerns, moral and practical, about an AI-powered system that can get so deeply involved in the creative process.
On one hand, it’s merely an assistant that aids in the donkey work of creating the perfect sonic palette for a production, and can be likened to using any sample that you didn’t create yourself. But on the other hand, Illugen can step beyond being a mere assistant and begin to guide – even supplant – your own creative decisions.
Some alternatives to Illugen include Output’s Co-Producer, which uses AI to help you discover artist-made samples, and even Waves’ own Cosmos, which uses AI to help you find samples in your sample library.
Whatever your view on AI, and irrespective of its current shortcomings, Illugen is an immensely impressive and innovative achievement. After a few more tweaks and updates, it could become a ubiquitous plugin for all types of producers and beatmakers.
Key Features

Standalone app for macOS 12+ and Windows 10+
AI-powered text-to-sound engine
3 samples created from every submitted phrase
Pay to create sounds using credits purchased via monthly subscription
Choice of one-shot, loop or SFX samples
Specify the tempo of loops and the length of SFX
Drag-and-drop from app to DAW
All generated samples saved to your computer, and held for 6 months in your Waves account

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