That sounds like you have not initialized the variables. You may find the full list in this gist. Copy and paste them into tidal and evaluate them. Then it should work.
You need to either evaluate them at the beginning of each session, or add them to your BootTidal.hs, as they are not there by default. There has been some talking about adding them to the stock tidal parameters but not sure when that will happen.
There are also alternatives to the syntax that you may find more convenient once you are familiar with the synth. See this thread.
Hope that helps!