Made a little Synthwave song

Performances, Streams & Live Coding
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I spent the day recording a few loops on my synths that I could arrange in SonicPi. I was able to finish this track and add some post effects in my DAW. I’m not sure if I’d consider this a complete song but perhaps I’ll put it aside for my next album or something.

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I like this track a lot! Is there any chance you could post your code on how you generated the various instruments and general track?

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Sorry I think I overwrote the code but like I said I used SonicPi to arrange some recorded synth loops. So I did not create this synth in SPi. If I remember I triggered two external synths: a Minilogue and a Microkorg to stack some arpeggios and then added in some external drum samples that I had lying around my computer. I did all the automation manually as the Minilogue has a build in automation recorder, not sure how to go about doing that in SPi but it can be done.

I think you should be able to do something like this pretty easily without the external equipment…

Here’s how you can start:

  1. Make a live_loop that plays a kick followed by a snare equally spaced. This will give you the simple kick-snare-kick-snare pattern that you hear in my track.
  2. Make a live_loop that uses one of Sonic Pi’s built in synths to play an arpeggio.

In my song I have two arpeggio patterns. One simply starts at the highest note in the chord I’m playing and ends in the lowest note, then repeats. So for example if you want to play a CMaj7 chord you’d order the notes in the pattern: B, G, E, C…repeat. You could also reverse the pattern if you want it to do an upwards progression.

My second arpeggio is a bit more complex as it doesn’t have a linear progression but instead jumps around. You can simply make your own pattern for this. Obviously you’ll want to use the notes you’re already using (B, G, E, C) plus some other notes, repeated notes, etc…

For further complexity in your sound I’d suggest layering two synths playing the same arpeggios up/down and octave. You can automate some parameters so it sounds like they’re LFO controlled. You can have slower or faster arpeggios playing in sync with the existing ones.

Also add some effects to the SPi synths. They’re going to need a good amount of reverb if you want them to sound full and spacey.

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I think I did something very similar lately. thanks for the explanation! What did you do since then?

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I’ve just been taking a break from SPi and working on another videogame release. It’s almost done and will likely be available for download next month.

I did make some music for it but hardly any of it uses SPi, I only sampled a bit of SPi loops I made for a couple songs. If you want to check out the game OST it’s here: https://bagofdragonite.bandcamp.com/album/alien-squatter-ost-ost
^This is also the link to my bandcamp so you can hear past songs on here, half of which I used SPi in my process.

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