---
license: other
license_name: stability-ai-community
license_link: https://stability.ai/license
tags:
  - mlx
  - audio
  - music-generation
  - stable-audio
  - text-to-audio
---

# SA3 Drone Bender — bending direction vectors

Contrastive bending direction vectors for the
[SA3 Drone Bender](https://github.com/danhearn/sa3-drone-bender-vst) JUCE
plugin: a real-time contrastive-DiT-bending + drift/feedback-loop instrument
built on a C++/MLX port of Stable Audio 3.

## Files

| File | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| `bending_directions_medium.safetensors` | 244K | 5 contrastive bending direction vectors (layers 4-11 of the medium DiT) |

5 semantic direction vectors (Harmonic Brightness, Melodic Activity, Textural
Density, Rhythmic Intensity, Register) extracted via contrastive analysis of
the medium DiT's internal activations (layers 4-11), used to steer generation
in the Drone Bender's "Bend" XY pad.

## Base model weights

This repo does **not** host the base Stable Audio 3 weights. Get those from
[maxgraf/sa3-variations-models](https://huggingface.co/maxgraf/sa3-variations-models)
— an MLX/safetensors port of Stability AI's `stabilityai/stable-audio-3-optimized`
medium bundle: `dit_medium_f16.safetensors`, `same_l_encoder_f32.safetensors`,
`same_l_decoder_f32.safetensors`, `t5gemma_f16.safetensors`.

`bending_directions_medium.safetensors` must sit alongside
`dit_medium_f16.safetensors` in the same models directory — the orchestrator
loads it as a sibling file.

## Usage

The [`setup.sh`](https://github.com/danhearn/sa3-drone-bender-vst/blob/main/setup.sh)
script in the plugin repo downloads all five required files (four from
`maxgraf/sa3-variations-models`, this one from here) and builds the plugin in
one step. To fetch just this file manually:

```sh
hf download Danhearn/sa3-drone-bender bending_directions_medium.safetensors \
  --local-dir /path/to/models
```

## License

`bending_directions_medium.safetensors` is original work derived from Stable
Audio 3's medium DiT internal activations, released under the
[Stability AI Community License](https://stability.ai/license) for
consistency with the base model weights.