Getting ready to be five (/four)

Next Friday I’m going to to be taking part in a 24 hour online algorave event wearefive to celebrate five years of the algorave movement. By accident or design I’m on back to back with co￥ﾡpt (aka Sean Cotterill) who is one of only a couple of us livecoding in pure SuperCollider, rather than the by-now overwelmingly popular TidalCycles.

Sean has been putting together an interesting set of pages on his approach to livecoding in SC, particularly on the things that need to be set up beforehand. I’ve evolved some similar ideas myself, perhaps little a less organised and more hacky. For interest, I’ve put my current setup files with comments on sccode.org and also a wee example of the kind of code I use.

Admittedly, some of this won’t make sense without the particular arrangement of samples and loops that I use. I’ve recently hit upon the idea of using an array of 32 different drum samples organised roughly in the following pattern:

00 a bass drum sound 01 hi hat 02 a snare 03 a different hi hat (or other hit) 04 a different bass drum sound … etc

That way, I can make a basic un-ta-ka-ta beat just by stepping through all 32, or segments thereof:

Pseq(~arrayOfHits, inf) Pseq(~arrayOfHits[4..7], inf)

I’ve also discovered some really quite good longer patterns with this layout, using Pslide:

Pslide(~arrayOfHits,inf,4,3)

Guess we'll see how all of this sounds at the rather unravy time of 0800 GMT next Friday!