Lofi Muslim

Side project of the week: I built an AI that composes music and then removes the music from itself. vibenasheeds: the claude for making vocal nasheed beats. Some of you might remember the lofi Muslim YouTube channel I posted about last year. I was making nasheed beats after 12-hour shifts at Simply Smashed because I could not find halal background music. Every nasheed pack was either £30+ per beat or so rinsed that you'd hear the same track in three different Muslim creators' videos on the same day. That whole channel was a test run... I've been cooking this up quietly between everything else. vibenasheeds is the actual thing. You prompt the vibe you want for your scene and AI generates a full track from scratch. Then what I'm calling the halal engine kicks in and separates the stems and strips the instruments out of the file, gone. What's left is vocals and daf. It composes with instruments first because that's how you get something that actually sounds good, then removes them... sounds like a weird extra step but the output is better (and I spent an embarrassing amount of time looking). The thing about the nasheed scene right now is the creators in it are incredible. I grew up watching them figure out an entire genre from scratch with basically nothing. You ever watch Chris Howett cycling through the mountains of Switzerland on an electric scooter? Half of why that youtube content hits the way it does is the audio. Muslim creators have been locked out of that entire dimension, you're either using the same 50 beats as everyone else or you're working in silence and hoping the visuals carry it. I want to describe what I'm hearing in my head for a specific moment and have it exist. Link in comments to try it out!

Every Muslim creator faces the same impossible choice. Use mainstream beats that compromise your values, or create content in silence. I felt this firsthand running Simply Smashed. We had a strict no-music policy, but how do you create engaging content without sound? How do you build atmosphere in your restaurant when customers walk in? I tried everything. Different beats, different ambient sounds. Nothing quite fit the vibe I wanted. Eventually we settled on live sports in the background - it worked for the restaurant atmosphere. But the content problem remained unsolved. That's when I remembered my old fascination with vocal beats. What started as casual interest became urgent necessity. So I taught myself. Every single night after brutal restaurant shifts, I'd come home exhausted and spend 1-2 hours learning to craft beats. My fingers fumbling through software I barely understood. My ears slowly training to hear what worked. Seven weeks in, something clicked. My YouTube channel "Lofi Muslim" hit 130 subscribers. I'm averaging 300 views daily. Comments started flooding in from Saudi Arabia, France from creators across continents saying "Finally, something that fits." Then came the moment that changed everything. A complete stranger bought my first beat. I stared at that notification for minutes. Someone I'd never met just paid for something I created in my bedroom after a restaurant shift. That's when I realised this wasn't just solving my problem. Muslim creators everywhere are starving for options. They're compromising their values because quality alternatives barely exist. Now I've got beats on Spotify and Apple Music. Creators are using my work in their content without me doing any marketing. The beat store is growing. But here's what really gets me: In an era where we consume endlessly, building something people actually want feels revolutionary. Lmk what you think! Do you vibe with the beats? Link in the comments.