Instrument samples that support chords?

Hello! I'm very new to Tidal Cycles and have zero programming knowledge but I'm getting the hang of the syntax and been loving experimenting with it so far. However there's something I'm very confused about.

I want to create rhythms using some chord progressions (for instance, c'maj d'min a'min'4 f'maj'7) and want that nice electronic vaporwave synthy sound. But the only two samples I know that can play chords are 'superpiano' and 'supermandolin'.

  1. Are there more in the default libraries that I can explore?
  2. As I don't have prior music knowledge either, I don't know how to go about finding these 'instruments'(?) online? What do I search for?

Sorry for the very noob questions. Like I said all this is very new to me but I'm very fascinated by it and been playing around with it non stop last several weeks.

Thank you!

Welcome - you have hit upon a very common source of confusion in tidal!

A couple of facts to note:

  1. Tidal sends a pattern command to Superdirt (a module inside the Supercollider program), instructing it to play sounds
  2. The sounds that Superdirt can play include Samples (small wav files in folders on disk eg bd, cp etc) and Synthesisers (synthdefs defined within Supercollider, eg superpiano, supermandolin).

Now, there are also two similarly named, and behaved functions in tidal which do different things depending on whether you're working with Samples, or Synths

This then complicates your questions slightly, so I'm going to re-word them for simpler answering:

For Synths:

Yes

Synthdefs, ugens for supercollider, eg:

Here's another set from the docs:

This is an amazing tute by @loopier:

Onto part 2:

For Samples:
note and n functions work differently for samples -

  • note speeds up or slows down the playback of the sample to emulate pitch. It's not smarter than that, and the samples change the length of their playback accordingly. If a sample is tuned to c then this method does an "ok" job of playing chords. note "c'maj" will play 3 of the same sample at once, with playback speed adjusted to change the relative pitch
  • n chooses a (counted from 0) index of samples in a folder, and does not change the playback speed at all. If you put n "c'maj" then this gets converted to a numerical representation of [0,4,7] and it will play the 0th, 4th and 7th sample in the folder, regardless of how they are tuned. If you DID put a bunch of correctly tuned samples in a folder together in the correct order, then this would play c'maj accurately :slight_smile: (PS I'm not aware of any samples in the default dirt_samples that does this, but here's one you could use)

I hope that's not too confusing!