Some help needed with understanding the grid and 'sleep' function

[ethancrawford]

Hello @magnetic_pole - welcome to in_thread
Almost the right place! the ‘Support, Help & Resources’ category is the ideal place for questions such as this - but at the end of the day, it can always be shifted around if necessary. (I’ve taken the liberty of transferring it to that category )

To answer and address your last question and confusion around sleep first: if you want to have, say, 1 bar divided into 16 quarter beats, then you would have a sleep of 0.25 beats between every drum sample.

Triggering a sample does not in itself cause any delays while the sample is playing; it merely sends an instruction to the sound engine to start playing, and continues on immediately with the next Sonic Pi code. So, if we have the following:

sample :misc_burp
sleep 1

The sample will start playing and the code will immediately sleep for 1 beat

Regarding making beat patterns in general - how much of Sonic Pi have you explored so far? - there’s several ways to do it. You can play multiple drum types in separate live_loops (separate live_loops being discussed in https://sonic-pi.net/tutorial#section-9-3 for example, if you haven’t already read the related tutorial chapter), or all drums in a single live_loop.

There are many interesting topics here on the forum about creating beat patterns - in case you are interested, here’s a few to get you started:

General Purpose Drumkit

Greatly inspired yesterday by @alexesc’s ace method for drum patterns, and in my quest to use SPi as a general purpose live and recording instrument I wrote a general purpose drumkit script. I’ve put this in 6/4, not to annoy you but coz that’s the track I’m working on just now. Four on the floor or boots and cats are great for sure, but c’mon there’s so many other great rhythms in the world and not just random ones ha ha This is so much easier than working out all the individual sle…

Drum Maschine in single line

Hey Guys/Girls I just wanna share my ideas about the drum machine. The idea is to create something like real drum machine in a single line. And so I wrote a simple function like this ##| define :maschine do |s_name, beats, amp, humanize, stretch| define :maschine do |var| ##| set default values in case they if they are not set _sample = !var[0].nil? ? var[0] : "bd_house" _beats = !var[1].nil? ? var[1].ring : [1] _n = _beats.length ? _beats.length : 1 _amp = !var[2].nil? ? var[2] : …

Idea for drums management

Hello, I’m new here and I want to share with you this implementation I made to handle drums inside a Sonic Pi track, in order to understand if this can be a good solution I liked the idea I found around the web (mostly here and here) to map the beats inside an array, to emulate somehow the common grids used by real drum machines and simplify the creation of beats. I also wanted to have something that gives the possibility to manage in easy way the evolution of the beats during …

Custom Drum Beat Player

So I’ve created a proof of concept for a ‘beat pattern’ language for creating beats from a string of characters. For now, it’s just a way to learn programming for Sonic Pi, although I hope to develop it into something useful. Here’s a demonstration: https://youtu.be/Dq7XDQb9PWE …and here’s the code: use_bpm 120 def playbeat(beatstring) samp = ":drum_bass_hard" sleep_dur = 1 for i in (0..beatstring.length-1).step(2) note = beatstring[i] dur = beatstring[i+1] case note …

…No doubt there are others hidden away elsewhere. You can probably find more by searching the forum for something like ‘beats pattern’ or ‘drums pattern’

Having said that, if none of those posts are quite as helpful as you would hope, and you’re still stuck afterwards, you’re absolutely welcome to come back and ask for further advice