Week 5 lesson 1 - musical notes

Follow-on video coming soon, and fair warning - I sing in the next one.

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is up the same as note?

Yes sorry this is something I meant to mention. note is the new up. The latter is now just an alias for the former.

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Thanks Alex!
I seem to be missing the dbass sample though - is that something I can get hold of?

Ah sorry! I'll add them to the samples-extra zip later, but in the meantime you can get them here https://slab.org/tmp/dbass.zip

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About the difference between sharps and flats you mentioned, there are two main reasons:

Ignore this post if you don't care about western music theory

  1. The historical one: Before equal temperament (tuning system based on having every note equally spread across an octave), when humans used the just intonation tuning system (based on the simplicity of ratios), sharps and flats were different frequencies. You can find more info on this here

  2. The descriptive one: If you play an F major chord (F-A-C), and you turn it into a minor chord, you would pitch the A -1 semitone, making it F-Ab-C. Calling it F-G#-C is kinda like throwing something out of nowhere. The same happens with scales but even more so, for convention and easy scale recognition, you wouldn't have the F major scale described as F-G-A-A#-C-D. You are having two A's in the same scale, it can be confusing to repeat notes, so we say it's F-G-A-Bb-C-D. This is also why sometimes using a scale with flats or sharps, when you get off the scale playing the regular counterpart of one of those flat notes, you will see it marked as a 'natural' in a music sheet.

But anyway, if you're not interested in documenting your music in music sheets, or don't play classical or jazz or related genres, you don't have to really care about this.

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For anyone not aware, the 'rash' samples (and many others) are included in this repo:

(in the 'extra-samples' folder)

Bryan

Those samples are ones I've collected for an album project.

All the additional samples needed for the course examples should be in the samples-extra.zip shared in this lesson:
Week 1 lesson 2 - Loading sample packs

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Just a fun fact: the letter H was mainly used in the German naming convention (adopted by Germany, Austria and Nordic countries) to indicate the natural B note, whereas B was used for B flat.
As example, the BACH motif had been composed (by Bach himself) on this old notation.

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Thanks I'm learning a lot about music theory this week!

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Week 7 Lesson 3 - Composing tracks with the 'ur' function

I noticed that |+ is equivalent to transposition if applied to 'note', so naturally I'm wondering if there's a quick notation for inversion, where the n pattern

n "0 3 4 5" becomes n "0 -3 -4 -5"

or n "3 6 -2 3" becomes n "3 0 8 3"

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I've been trying to write some code to play random notes chosen from a scale with a euclidean rhythm, but I've got stuck. Here's what I have so far:

d2 $ struct "t(3,8)" $ note (scale "minor" "[0|1|3|4]") # s "arpy"

But that just seems to choose a single note from the scale and then play it 3 times in a 3,8 rhythm before choosing another. I'd like each note to be chosen from the list of notes. I've tried using choose but scale returns a pattern, and choose needs a list. Any ideas?

The following works, but maybe gives too much control over the random element?

d1 $ struct "t(3,8)" $ note (scale "minor" "0 [1|4] [12|7]") # s "midi" # midichan 0

Yes the [|] notation chooses one value per cycle. This should do it:

d2 $ struct "t(3,8)" $ note (scale "minor" $ choose [0,1,3,4]) # s "arpy"
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That's great, thank you both for your help!

Hi. How do you use more than 12 notes in an octave for microtonal music?

You can use supercollider tunings: https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt/blob/develop/hacks/pitch-model-from-tidal.scd

Or you can also just use decimal numbers, e.g. n "40.25" # s "supermandolin"

The latter doesn't work with all synths (like superpiano)

see you

I saw in your manual about floating point numbers for notes and thought they rounded to integers for any SynthDef. Thanks for the tunings for SuperCollider.