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Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

sonic-pi.net

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Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#3

Post by djaychela »

pvinis wrote: post #2

I recently was trying this again, also searching online for people using it, and I could only find club music made with it, which made me just give up on trying further. I wish there were some YouTube channel what made nice music with sonicpi or similar.

Can you give a better definition than nice music?

I think one reason why tools like this lead to creation of dance music is that the structures are readily created using them, and in addition they tend to make synth and sample sounds which are often heard in dance... It's pretty quick to code a 4 on the floor dance beat, but programming Gene Krupa will be much more challenging!

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#4

Post by djaychela »

I've spent some time trying to work with Sonic Pi, but I've really struggled with the syntax, finding it difficult to work with. I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point.

If anyone's got any suggestions, or can point to a python version of the same (I spent a fair bit of time working with FoxDot which does use python so it made more sense to me) it'd be appreciated - this is something I'd really like to get into, but have found the hurdles a bit too tall!

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#5

Post by ilyt »

djaychela wrote: post #3
pvinis wrote: post #2

I recently was trying this again, also searching online for people using it, and I could only find club music made with it, which made me just give up on trying further. I wish there were some YouTube channel what made nice music with sonicpi or similar.

Can you give a better definition than nice music? I think one reason why tools like this lead to creation of dance music is that the structures are readily created using them, and in addition they tend to make synth and sample sounds which are often heard in dance... It's pretty quick to code a 4 on the floor dance beat, but programming Gene Krupa will be much more challenging!

You'd most likely just treat is as another synth - write "code" to make the sounds then "data" to just feed it notes.

And making traditional song wouldn't be as interesting demo for it I'd imagine

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#6

Post by simongray »

djaychela wrote: post #4

I've spent some time trying to work with Sonic Pi, but I've really struggled with the syntax, finding it difficult to work with. I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point. If anyone's got any suggestions, or can point to a python version of the same (I spent a fair bit of time working with FoxDot which does use python so it made more sense to me) it'd be appreciated - this is somethin…

> I'm fluent in Python but find the use of colons is the real sticking point.

The you'd probably have hated its predecessor which was all about the parentheses: https://overtone.github.io/

It's too bad that superficial stuff like which characters you need to type is holding you back. Getting used to Ruby when you're familiar with Python is no big deal. I would just stick with it

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#7

Post by xavriley »

pvinis wrote: post #2

I recently was trying this again, also searching online for people using it, and I could only find club music made with it, which made me just give up on trying further. I wish there were some YouTube channel what made nice music with sonicpi or similar.

I’ve got a few pieces here which aren’t all dance (e.g. live coded sampling of bass guitar) https://www.xavierriley.co.uk/talks/

@rbnpi has also done some lovey work with classical music that’s worth checking out

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#8

Post by xavriley »

For anyone wondering, a lot of work on Sonic Pi recently has gone into integrating an Elixir backend to handle distributed jamming. It has Ableton Link support so it can easily be synced with a DAW and other apps. It can also control external devices via MIDI and OSC protocols more reliably as a result.

Re: Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

#10

Post by bodge5000 »

Have been trying to get into live coding, mostly with Supercollider but Sonic-Pi looks nice as well (certainly less verbose). On the composition side of things it seems to be fantastic, I've used a lot of Renoise and this way of doing things just feels like a more direct way of what I was trying to do there, really nice.

The big drawback for me so far has been sound design. Actually building your own synths can be difficult to even get the basics down, working with samples is predictably a bit of a pain (to the point where I intended to just use synths for everything, drums included), and it doesn't look like many of these tools provide an easy way to reuse synths you've made before in different files.

I know that a lot of the time you can plug these tools into a traditional DAW, which obviously fixes the sound design issue, but this is the kind of thing I'd only really want to use standalone. Maybe its just a part of the learning curve, and eventually sound design gets more intuative.

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