Playing the Blues with TouchOSC

Performances, Streams & Live Coding
1

Finally got around to making a video of one of my projects that I made using TouchOSC after the great tutorial that @robin.newman made .

Set up 3 buttons to play the I, IV & V chords of a Blues progression and a slider that runs through 5 octaves of a pentatonic scale to use to solo while playing the chords.

Here’s the code

set :trans, 0

pent = scale(:e2, :minor_pentatonic, num_octaves: 5)

osc_send "192.168.1.4", 9000, "osc/Blues/fader1", 0
osc_send "192.168.1.4", 9000, "osc/Blues/toggle1", 0
sleep 0.2

live_loop :Ichord do
  use_real_time
  b = sync "/osc/Blues/push1"
  puts "Button 1 is ", b[0]
  if b[0] > 0
    play [52, 56, 62, 71], amp: 3, release: 0.5
  end
end

live_loop :IVchord do
  use_real_time
  b = sync "/osc/Blues/push2"
  puts "Button 1 is ", b[0]
  if b[0] > 0
    play [57, 61, 67, 76], amp: 3, release: 0.5
  end
end

live_loop :Vchord do
  use_real_time
  b = sync "/osc/Blues/push3"
  puts "Button 1 is ", b[0]
  if b[0] > 0
    play [59, 63, 69, 78], amp: 3, release: 0.5
  end
end

live_loop :slider do
  use_real_time
  b = sync "/osc/Blues/fader1"
  puts "slider is ", b[0]
  set :trans, b[0]*24
end

live_loop :toggle do
  use_real_time
  b = sync "/osc/Blues/toggle1"
  puts "toggle is ", b[0]
  if b[0] > 0
    use_synth :tb303
    x = play pent[get(:trans).floor], sustain: 1000
    set :x, x
    in_thread do
      loop do
        control get(:x),note: pent[get(:trans).floor]
        sleep 0.01
      end
    end
  else
    control get(:x),amp: 0,amp_slide: 0.1
    sleep 0.1
    kill get(:x)
  end
end

Here’s a link to download the TouchOSC template.

2

Nice. TouchOSC makes a great controller. So flexible and versatile, and links to Sonic Pi so easily.

3

I gave the code a run through and suggest a couple of alterations.
First, if you are sending your OSC messages to the same address, it is more convenient to use
use_osc "192.168.1.4",9000
to set up the ip address and port followed by calls to osc to send messages
Secondly, you shouldn’t add osc to the beginning of the OSC address when SENDING a message, but only use the address of the TouchOSC element with which you wish to communicate. Sonic Pi only prepends /osc to all INCOMING OSC messages.
Putting both these points together use the code:

set :trans, 0
use_osc "192.168.1.240",9000 #additional line to specify destination for OSC command

pent = scale(:e2, :minor_pentatonic, num_octaves: 5)

osc "/Blues/fader1", 0 #use osc instead of osc_send, and dont add osc to start of address
osc  "/Blues/toggle1", 0
sleep 0.2

for the beginning of the code for the program. The remainder is as you specify above.

Fortuitously your code worked because you used osc/Blues/fader1 rather than /osc/Blues/fader1 (OSC addresses should start with /) and the osc was ignored thus actually using /Blues/fader1 as the (correct) address.

1 Like
4

Thanks Robin! I feel like my code working is always fortuitous :grinning: