Drums and bass loop (tips and comments appreciated)

[ddimitrov]

I had a bit of fun with Sonic PI (work in progress here), but I feel I may be doing it “the hard way”

Hre is a short list:

1. The “roll” function feels like something I shouldn’t have to do myself, but I couldn’t find an idiomatic way to achieve the same thing.
2. Also it feels weird to set the tempo to 480 bpm, to achieve something that sounds more like 120bpm. Is sleep 1 supposed to be one beat or a full bar? Is there any way to specify a time signature and use notations like full, half, dot, etc? Or define a meter for a loop and then just write the sequencer of notes?
3. Is there any way to include external files / libraries without pasting them in a buffer?

I will appreciate review comments and tips, as well as pointers to articles/docs or interesting code that I can read.

P.S. I found Sonic Pi Online Resources - this would keep me busy for a while

[ethancrawford]

Hey @ddimitrov,

@ddimitrov

The “roll” function feels like something I shouldn’t have to do myself, but I couldn’t find an idiomatic way to achieve the same thing.

There isn’t a dedicated roll function, but the function that will probably be most useful for creating your own is density. (See details in the Lang section of the help panel). There are a handful of topics here on in_thread I can see that relate to a similar question:

New to Sonic pi so every little helps

Hey Im looking to make rap, trap, grime, drill lofi and afrobeats type music. So far i’ve gone through the tutorials and have got a grasp of a lot of the language. I guess I want to know if there are any resources out or if you have any advice to get me going in the right direction. Cheers

Stutter / beat repeat

Hi, this is my first post and I’m also very new to live coding or even coding for that matter. I first stumbled upon Tidal Cycles and then Sonic Pi. I actually prefer Sonic Pi as it has many things implemented in more straightforward way. There is however a thing that I find Tidal is especially good at, and being a newb, I wonder how you would approach the same thing in Sonic Pi. The thing is about making beat repeats or stutter. In Tidal you simply multiply / divide chosen beat and bam. To b…

How to do beat repeat

I’ve been wanting to do more IDM kinda music lately, got into ableton live, but drawing midi is boring and I’m super bad at playing drums on a midi controller or coming up with good patterns in the first place. So here comes sonic pi to the rescue! I came up with a pattern I like and will be sending it via midi to ableton to experiment with. But I wanted to se if I could do some beat repeat directly in sonic pi. I found a thread by @sub_repeat but I could not reply, maybe it’s locked or patreon…

(There might be others)…

@ddimitrov

Is sleep 1 supposed to be one beat or a full bar?

The sleep function works with beats, so 1 beat.

@ddimitrov

Is there any way to specify a time signature and use notations like full , half , dot , etc? Or define a meter for a loop and then just write the sequencer of notes?

Not that I know of, you’d need to assign durations to variables yourself - eg:

quaver = 0.5
crotchet = 1
dottedcrotchet = 1.5
minim = 2
semibreve = 4
minimquaver = 2.5

(Or whatever names you want to give them obviously).

@ddimitrov

Is there any way to include external files / libraries without pasting them in a buffer?

As far as external files, yes! What you are after is run_file. Libraries on the other hand, such as Ruby gems, are not officially supported - you can try referencing them in Sonic Pi code, but there’s no guarantee they will work…

[nlb]

hi @,

Just concerning the name of note lengths, Music Theory: Note Names, Rests & Dotted Notes - YouTube, it seems that american and British have different names
here is a little example How to code this song on sonic PI - #5 by nlb