Heya, I'm new to Tidal and enjoying learning the syntax and how I can encode interesting music in it. Separately from those pieces, I'm struggling with going from having all of the right notes encoded, but having the instruments themselves sound fairly bland. I can twiddle around with settings I don't fully understand to try and shape the soundscape, but it would be wonderful if there was more plug and play I could access, like "here's a warm jazz guitar sound".
Pointers much appreciated!
Tidal as it turns out, just generates patterns - it's not specifically a sound generator. The sound generation comes from Supercollider/SuperDirt who choose to interpret the patterns tidal sends in the context of samples and synths that those tools control.
A way for you to get what you're looking for is to find a software/hardware synth that provides presets you like (eg a warm jazz guitar sound), and control it via tidal. Midi is probably the most common way to do this, and is supported through SuperDirt setup:
Thank you, that's quite helpful. I ended up using the MIDI integration with SuperCollider to control instruments in Logic Pro. It's made all my tidal programs sound a ton better. There's a weird glitch where every now and then I hear a weird chime sound, I'll try to get to the bottom of that. But this is a great route to allow me to separate out the sounds from the music patterns themselves, like you callout