Making a synth play infinitely long but still control it

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Hi there,

as a (slightly boring, but anyway doable) form of intro for some live coding, I’d like to have a synth play a single note for a looong time.

With a large value for release or sustain, this is easily doable of course:
synth :prophet, note: :e1, sustain: 10000

However, I’d like to be able to control this synth somehow, after it’s been started mostly so I can turn it off at some point. Easy, in theory, with control.
But if I start the synth and don’t want to restart it the time I reevaluate my code, I need to put it in a live_loop, right? And at that moment I need the live_loop to sleep.
Of course I can set the value for sleep to a high value too, but then the loop is not restarted for the amount of the sleep and I therefore my code changes with which I want to control the synth are not applied.

I tried putting the control node into the time state and get it out in a different loop, but even though the value was defined, controlling it didn’t change the sound.

live_loop :sing do
  n = play 40, sustain: 10000
  set :n, n
  sleep 10000
end

live_loop :sing_control do
  sleep 10
  n = get[:n]
  co = ring 70, 90
  20.times do
    control n, cutoff: co.tick, cutoff_slide: 2
    sleep 2
  end
end

Anyone got any other ideas or hints?

1 Like
2

How about instead of sleeping for a long time to pause your live loop, you instead sync on a yet-to-be-sent cue message? Then you can call cue at some later point to get it started again…

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3

This article might help

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4

Thank you so much. This works beautifully and is exactly what I was looking for!

live_loop :sing do
  sync :startstuff
  n = play 60, sustain: 1000000
  sync :stopstuff
  control n, amp: 0, amp_slide: 3
end


live_loop :control do
  sleep 2
  cue :startstuff
  sleep 10
  cue :stopstuff
  stop
end

Wasn’t aware from the docs, that syncing on a cue that hasn’t been sent yet, is basically waiting for that sync. Which of course makes total sense, so my bad :slight_smile:.