(As part of my spring cleaning I've merged a couple of separate threads into this single one for thoughts about the course.)
Looking ahead to week 4, I think I'll focus on two related things - continuous patterns, and randomness. This will include shaping or automating effects over time with sine, sawtooth etc waves, and different kinds of random functions. We'll also look at some functions for shuffling, and generally think about what randomness is, and what it does and doesn't give us (beware, I have some opinions on this).
After that it'll be the end of the cycle.. I think I'll then take a week off from releasing videos, although the forum will of course stay open and the materials available long term. That'll give me time to work on the reference text and look into coordinating better with @heavy.lifting and other potential contributors to the course.
I'll ask you all to go through the pay-as-you-feel wall to get access to the next batch of videos etc for the next four weeks, but as before will make no judgment about those who can't afford it for reasons of exchange rate or lack of cash! This course is for all.
So after next week and the rest week, we'll likely kick off the next cycle with focus on making melodies, something I've been having a lot of fun with lately.. Then after that a week on interference patterns, another on 'escaping the grid', maybe another on input and output via MIDI and others, at which point we'll be through the Tidal basics and I'll be open to suggestions of what we do next! It might be that eight weeks in total is enough, lets see..
@yaxu I have one other thought for the sharing/challenge component:
Define hashtags we can use to easily find others content on soundcloud/clyp -
I'd do one like #cycle0 as a generic tag to identify course participants, and #challenge1 or otherwise similarly named to suit the activity.
It might be worth trying to get #tidalcycles used commonly too, you could get a handle on how many people out there are creating with it?
@yaxu thanks a lot for organising this, I'm finding it very useful and fun!
After the basics are covered, one topic I'd like to suggest would be looking at how to actually put it all together, approaches for making live sets, songs etc. I know each artist eventually develops her own style and it's all very personal, but I think it'd be interesting hearing some point of view and learning more about the big picture, live performance strategies etc.
For me personally that has always been the big obstacle with tidal (and livecoding in general): I do some tutorials, learn the language, even manage to write down some nice loop but then I find it really hard to go from there to say a 1h set...
I know it all requires practice and is not something that can be explained in one video, but I thought it could be a nice topic to explore and discuss!
Sorry taken a while to respond to this! I hope the performance talkthrough with @hellocatfood helped a bit towards this. Will talk with @heavy.lifting about how to approach this aspect too, we covered preparing for sets etc in the summerschool we ran in Sheffield last year.
I would say though that preparing a 1h solo live coding set is tricky. I like 30 mins as a sweet spot, 40 mins as a comfortable maximum (with preparation, a good night's sleep etc!). I have done 2 hour+ performances, but generally only in collaboration.. We should set up some networked collaboration as part of this course at some point - it's a great way to get inspiration!
Welcome to a fresh influx of Tidal club members! Let me know if you have any questions or concerns, and if you have problems installing, there's a section for that.. We'll get you sorted!
There's two new lessons up today, in the form of a random function marathon:
I'm behind on doing live streams, so lets fit two in this weekend !
For the first one, I'll attempt tidalclub challenge #2. I'm not 100% sure about the second one - ideas welcome! We can do some q+a during both of them.
I was supposed to come at the summer school last year, but unfortunately I couldn't make it and had to cancel
Yeah that could be fun! I personally would be quite interested in trying out some collaboration, I'm sure there's a lot of potential for fun and learning!
Thanks for all the feedback! I'll leave it open to responses for another day or two before posting a summary. Already it's been really useful.
Here's a first draft of a plan for the next weeks of the course, starting next week. I'm not 100% sure whether I'll be able to spend as much time on it all, because I'm expecting fewer signups/less income for the next two rounds, but it should be OK. In any case some of the weeks look a bit too ambitious, so might end up having to spread them out over more weeks. Thoughts + suggestions welcome !
Week 5 - Tonality
Melodies and chords
Arpeggios
Canons
Week 6 - Control all the things
Controlling supercollider synths
Controlling MIDI
Controlling visuals and other things with OSC
Week 7 - Deeper into functions
Manipulating time
Combining functions
Making shorthands
Week 8 - music production
Review of effects
Longer form composition with “ur” - patterns of patterns
Sending data to a DAW (digital audio workstation)
Working with ‘snippets’
Live streaming
another break!
Week 9 - binary patterns
binary operations
sharing metre and other variables
Week 10, 11, 12 - all the functions
A methodical look at Tidal’s library of pattern transformation functions, trying out everything including the SECRET stuff, no sleep until it’s all covered !
Just wanted to thank everyone on @cycle1 for signing up to the second four-week block. Over 150 have stuck with it (or signed up for two blocks at once), which makes it all very much worth putting the videos together, as well as financially sustainable. Thanks !
thanks
. Thank you