Ok welcome to mini-notation week! Here's the first video and worksheet, exploring sequencing of sounds in Tidal's mini-notation.
Please feel free to let me know what you think about this, and ask all the questions, by hitting reply!
- 0:00 - intro
- 1:14 - recap - basic interaction, making and stopping sound
- 3:03 - mini-notation sequencing
- 3:15 - the steps more you add, the faster it goes to fit them into a cycle
- 5:03 - 'sound' and 's' mean the same thing
- 6:01 - split a 'sound' pattern into a 'sound' and 'n' pattern
- 6:49 - inserting gaps or 'rests' with '~'
- 7:13 - breaking steps down into 'subsequences'
- 8:38 - putting subsequences within subsequences
Copy and paste the following into atom (or whatever editor you've set up with tidal), to explore the concepts in the video.
-- Mini-notation worksheet, number one!
-- Play a "kick" sound (the first one in the folder)
d1 $ sound "kick"
-- Play a different sound from the "kick" folder (the fourth one, counting from zero)
d1 $ sound "kick:3"
-- Play a kick - snare loop. Notice two sounds fit in the same time as one did above
d1 $ sound "kick snare"
-- The more you add, the faster it goes - the 'cycle' stays constant
d1 $ sound "kick snare kick snare"
d1 $ sound "kick snare kick snare kurt hi lo hi lo"
-- Again, we can pick sounds with : and a number
d1 $ sound "cpu:0 cpu:2 cpu:4 cpu:6 cpu:0 cpu:2 cpu:6 cpu:8"
-- If they're all from the same folder, it's easier to pattern
-- the sounds using a separate "n" pattern, like this:
d1 $ n "0 2 4 6 0 2 6 8" # sound "cpu"
-- `#` combines together patterns of different kinds, in this case a 'sound'
-- and an 'n' pattern.
-- We'll come back to `#` (and how it differs from '$') in the future!
-- You can have an 'empty' step, known as a musical rest, with '~'
d1 $ sound "kick snare ~ clap:4"
d1 $ n "0 2 2 ~ 8 ~ 8 ~" # sound "cpu"
-- You can also "break down" a step into a subsequence, with []
-- Lets start with a simple pattern
d1 $ sound "hi lo hi lo"
-- And squeeze a two-step subsequence inside that third step:
d1 $ sound "hi lo [hi hi] lo"
-- It works for 'n' patterns too
d1 $ n "0 1 [5 5 5] 4" # sound "drum"
-- You can even break down a step inside a subsequence:
d1 $ sound "hi lo [hi [hi lo hi lo]] lo"
-- It's easy to make nice compount time signatures:
d1 $ sound "[hi lo hi] [hi lo hi lo]"
There's a lot more to go through with the mini-notation, I'll put another video up in the next couple of days.
Have fun with it, while also exploring the sounds in the default samples and extra-samples samplepack (You'll see a list of them in the supercollider "post window" when you start superdirt). If you haven't loaded up the extra-samples yet, have a look at the previous lesson.
If you make something you like, be sure to save it somewhere and keep it safe! You might also like to keep several versions of a pattern, saving not only the final pattern but how you got there.. A lot of the music in live coding is in the edits, and not just the end result!
Next lesson: