Getting hands-on experience with Sonic Pi

Creative programming workshop with Sonic Pi

I found a hands-on tutorial for Sonic pi.

Here is how it goes. We already covered some of t he poonts by sequentially going through the documentation.

Looping

We can loop infinitely by:

loop do
sleep 0.5
play :d4
sleep 0.5
play :e4
sleep 0.5
play :c4
sleep 0.5
end

Or we can specify the number of repitions

4.times do
sleep 0.5
play :d4
sleep 0.5
play :e4
sleep 0.5
play :c4
sleep 0.5
end

Adding different tracks

Here a live_loop comes into play. basically multiple sounds play at the same time.

use_bpm 100
live_loop :drums do
sample :drum_heavy_kick
sleep 1
sample :drum_snare_hard
sleep 1
sample :drum_heavy_kick
sleep 1
sample :drum_snare_hard
sleep 1
end
live_loop :hihat do
sample :drum_cymbal_closed
sleep 0.25
sample :drum_cymbal_pedal
sleep 1
end
live_loop :bass do
use_synth :fm
play :c2, attack: 0, release: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play :c2, attack: 0, release: 0.3
sleep 2
play :e2
sleep 0.75
play :f2
sleep 1
end

Now that we have the bass and drums, let’s start to worry about the main melody.

Lead track

Instead of typing play, sleep for every single note, we can use the play_pattern_timed method.

live_loop :melody do
play_pattern_timed [:c4, :e4, :f4, :g4, :f4, :e4, :f4, :g4, :f4, :e4, :f4], [0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 1.5, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25]
end

play_pattern_timed [notes],[lengths]

(pseudo-)Randomness

We can play random notes, lengths and anything that can be controlled by numbers really.

to choose randomly from a list of notes:

play [40,45,50].choose

To randomly choose an octave

use_octave [0, 1].choose

To randomly choose a note from a chord:

play (chord :c, :major).choose

You get the point.

We already covered ops, let’s look at effects;

Effects

we change the effects by encapsulating the code with with_fx

live_loop :effects do
with_fx :wobble do
with_fx :slicer do
with_fx :reverb do
play rrand(20,120)
sleep 0.5
sample :elec_plip
sleep 0.5
play rrand(20,120)
end
end
end
end

This is what this piece of code sounds like:

Ticks and rings

Ticks go through the notes of a progression sequentially in a list. A finite list is bound to end. So we make it a circular list. A ring. Then we are ready to pass it.

Variables

Variables are used to reference a certain object and do operations over it. In the context [of music, we can change the pitch played.

This is a useful tutorial plus it comes with a little cheat sheet:

https://sonic-pi.mehackit.org/exercises/en/10-cheatsheet/01-cheatsheet.html