Oops, didn't manage getting the playlist
3 Likes
i tried for something slow. working with longer samples.
i found the striate command looking through lucys favourite functions 
and used this extensively along with filtering and room / size, trying to use the filters to add variation of a quite repetetative pattern
the tempo is starting at 0.8 cps, when it was time to change the tempo i initially thought i would go up, but went for even slower to 0.4 cps
not sure if the tempo drop makes a big difference when using samples of this kind, but i definitely felt like i had to add the clicky percussive sound when things got really slow. also not really sure what i think of the drum beat in the 1st section.
making this assignment / recording was a really nice experience! made me go much deeper in the process, tweaking and listening a lot more. while recording i went on for a long long time and it got really meditative tweaking settings, doing minor edits etc.
8 Likes
Hi there!
Here my homework:
- The idea was to focus only on percussion patterns this time. And try to get glitchy patterns by combining regular ones with random parts.
- I wrote the code at 1 cps but then execute it at 0.6 and 1.6 for the recordings.
My conclusions so far are:
- I need to keep working to get the sound I had in mind.
- I provably chose a too extreme tempos. It sounded way better at 1 cps.
- When executing it at slow tempo, you don't get to see the patterns and sounds too uneven.
- When executed at higher tempo the sound is excessively saturated with drums.
- Anyway if I had to pick one I'd keep the fast one!
Tnx for listening!
2 Likes
Here's my crack at the challenge!
Definitely had some unexpected results from changing effects parameters, including a nice little delay freakout, but it was interesting seeing how much I could do with each sound.
And I was pleasantly surprised just how different the piece felt at a slower tempo. Totally different mood with relatively little alteration.
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OK, I've been absent for a while but I tried out the challenge:
It was very interesting how different this was from how I usually think about things - I usually start out with a tempo in mind and kind of build the pattern around that.
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If these are pretty much identical in terms of code but for tempo, then you have forcefully made @yaxu 's point in assigning this challenge - they feel like very^2 different pieces.
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I really enjoyed this - I assume the faster tempo was what you wrote it for. I really loved the tiny amount of melodic movement amongst the rhythm (which frankly, was also very minimalist - rarely is there more than one sound being played at any given time)
That minimalism was just more pronounced in the second, and I was about to turn it off after about a minute when I noticed tiny little variations (delay, repetitions etc) getting introduced and suddenly I was drawn back in.
That was really beautiful
Here's my go. Daunting to post here, with so much good stuff.
Think I may have learned more about the impact of the tempo changing from other people's stuff. Patterns I went with, in retrospect, may have been too long or structured in such a way that the tempo change didn't make - at least to my ears - a huge qualitative difference. What I do like is that the shifts do come together to feel like one piece -- maybe a bit too much so.
3 Likes
I really enjoyed this, it was very ambient while still very musical
Only thing I'd say is related to this week's cut/legato lesson - there's a couple of places where the bass samples overlap slightly, and in that frequency the waveforms get a bit... unstable for lack of a better word. It's almost like in some cases they're cancelling each other out, and in some they are making superwaves - it's more obvious in the second section
Thanks for this! Guess it shows that I haven't yet made it to this week's lesson - I'll pay special attention.
Grabación del reto 1.
Espero les guste, cheers!
3 Likes
am a bit behind..
here's my attempt:
chaotic doubling of tempo around 1:50.
I prefer the second half, which is interesting because I didn't plan that part out at all, I think the use of degradeBy in the second half added more texture.
welcome to thoughts
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I started the course one week ago. I didn't know nothing about live coding.
I wanted to make a challenge with just a few voice samples and improv with speeds and effects... and some crazy stuff happened, a lot of fun, but not very fancy result xD
Still a lot to learn, but very happy with my progress so far.
8 Likes
It was already groovy, but it got even more energetic after the speed went up!
The first 90 seconds of the recording gradually build up really nicely.
I'm guessing the pulse gets perceived as a bit more regular, definitely doing it's job.
Love how the vocals are edited and those stuttering synth sounds as well, whole thing makes me think of club edits of pop songs a little bit, still it's way cleaner than something done on a pair of CDJs I have to say.
2 Likes
Hi everyone. Catching up a bit, here is my first challenge.
As a basis, I used some field recordings that I made of a blackbird that sings on the adjacent roof gable in summer. First I cut out sections of 1-2 measures of mostly birdsong from the background. Then I played with the sample manipulations from the week 3 lessons.
I was pleased to get something musical (to my tastes) out of the combination of the natural melodies in the recordings, rhythmic switching between recordings, and artificial speed/pitch changes. It gives me hope to maybe be able to use some of the audio holiday snaps that I have been hoarding all these years.
Just for completeness sake, I went for three tempos.
setcps 0.5625 --tempo 1
d1 $ striate 8 $ n ("<0 1 2 3 4>"+0) # s "blackbird"
# speed "<0.50 0.25 [1, 2] 0.7>" # legato 2
# room 0.2 # sz 0.2
d2 $ s "[bd ~] bd bd sd" # gain 0.7
For the faster tempo, I just reduced the number of striate divisions (I don't remember what the logic of this was in context). I also slowed down the "chord change" pattern in 'speed' so it would be roughly parallel to that of before, kind of moving to stay in place.
setcps 1.2 --tempo 2
d1 $ striate 4 $ n ("<0 1 2 3 4>"+0) # s "blackbird"
# speed "<0.50 0.25 [1, 2] 0.7>/2" # legato 2
# room 0.1 # sz 0.2
d2 $ s "[bd ~] bd bd sd" # gain 0.7
For the slow tempo, I lowered the pitch drastically as well as deepened the reverb. I increased the legato to give a fuller or more polyphonic feel.
setcps 0.3 --tempo 3
d1 $ striate 8 $ n ("<0 1 2 3 4>"+0) # s "blackbird"
# speed ("<0.50 0.25 [1, 2] 0.7>"/3) # legato 4
# room 0.6 # sz 0.9
d2 $ s "[bd ~] bd bd sd" # gain 1
To me, the first seems like it has the most defined melody. The second maintains a lot of character of the first, but has a more diffuse feel, perhaps because it's cutting in more segments and there isn't something consistent for the speed pattern to impose a melody on. The slow section is nice, I think, because it breaks up some of the samey-ness of the previous sections.
So, the fast (2nd) tempo would be the one to improve, maybe try to find the same kind of melodic sense as the first, and that means consistent sample material and maybe a longer running 'speed' pitch pattern. But now that I'm out of the code, it's hard to get back to that abstract mindset to improve it.
Sample jockeys, how would you have done it different? G
3 Likes
Late to the party, slowly meandering my way thru the course. Really impressed with the work people did for this! My example is really simple, there is no movement or progression in it, and I now realize that I missed the instruction to tweak parameters while recording. I used the same pattern for both tempos, first at 0.4 and then at 0.8.
setcps 0.4
setcps 0.8
d1 $ speed "0.5 [1 6] 4 [2.5 3]" # sound "claus:14"
d2 $ n "1*4 <~ 1*4 1*2 1*8>" # s "claus"
# gain 1.1
d3 $ n "0(3,8)" # s "bskick"
# gain 1.4
Thoughts on tempo: I really like the faster version of the beat better. I feel like it has more energy to it, the punchiness of the kick is more effective and it drives the whole piece. However, I like the "melody" better in the slow version. Once it gets sped up it seems much more simple than it did before. I would add more complexity to it if I did it again.
Overall thoughts: I have no experience with music production, and I feel I learned a lot listening to other people's examples with a focus on changing tempo. I wish I would have played around with some sort of progression, I was way too focused in on changing a single parameter - tempo - and leaving everything else the same. Also the the kick completely covers part of the "melody" and I didn't hear that until listening to it the next day. It made it sound even more simple as there are notes you can't hear over the kick.
1 Like
Hello! I am attending the first weeks of the course and I am wondering if the challenges are supposed to match the weeks or lessons somehow. Or are they completely unrelated?
Welcome @torto, as I remember they were designed so people could jump in at any time. Sorry if things are confusing joining the course at this point, let me know if there are other things that could be clearer.