supercollider VS DaisySP

Link to the audio programming language / server they're using in the article: https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider

For the intrepid, especially those annoyed with the purported input-sluggishness of musescore et al, an interesting text-based alternative is LilyPond https://lilypond.org/

My dad wrote an opera using LilyPond in vim, though I believe these days he's actually doing more with supercollider, which skips sheetmusic and goes right to sounds: https://supercollider.github.io/

Weirdly enough,I got into programming through music. I got into making experimental electronic music and ended up learning SuperCollider. Figured I’d have to get a real job at some point and I liked learning Supercollider enough that I figured I should try to go back to school and learn some more useful programming languages

So you’re wondering what would making music with code look like? The tools I’m familiar with are TidalCycles, Sonic Pi, and SuperCollider. I’m having a hard time describing what it’s like to make music with tools like these so here’s a video of a performance. One person is live coding the music and the other is live coding the visuals. I think it’s super cool how the music is improvised and built over time by layering commands. Some keywords you could search to see more examples would be Algorave and Livecoding.

So far mostly Vim (not for coding, just writing so far), NetHack, Firefox, and mpd and ncmpcpp. Also mpv occasionally. I'm planning on installing SuperCollider at some point too and getting back into that, but that shouldn't be too heavy either.

I would say no there aren't any sample packs for this kind of stuff because this entire scene developed around using a samplers and sampling as well as some computer tools like Max/Msp, SuperCollider, Recycle, Cool Edit Pro and some other stuff I am quite likely forgetting at the moment. Also you might look at some of the IRCAM stuff too.

Sonic pi is basically a wrapper for the amazing language Supercollider (https://supercollider.github.io/). I highly recommend watching Eli Fieldsteel's excellent tutorials on it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzsOOiJ_p4&list=PLPYzvS8A_rTaNDweXe6PX4CXSGq4iEWYC) to see some of what its capable of (I think he is almost a finished a new book on it as well).

You are about to bite off a lot. Ignore all the other advice in this thread, I do this for a living.

You have some software experience, this is good. Assuming you have embedded software experience (which is essential for what you are doing and not at all like web programming) you have a foothold to finish this project without going completely insane.

Hardware is a completely different beast. With software everything happens in your head and when you get stuck you can usually think your way out of it. With hardware, you really do need to learn to do things meticulously and step by step. There are many things that can go wrong. You will learn a lot on this journey.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Finding a hardware community will be essential to do this as you learn the skills you need. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, best to go in embracing it

A good place to start is to join an open source community for MIDI. Two off the top of my head is http://www.ucapps.de/ for MIDI specific hardware and https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy

A large amount of the work you will find yourself doing at the beginning is just figuring out where and who to ask questions about things like the keybed and other hardware issues. None of this is terribly 'hard' but none of it is easy. Most of it comes from experience.

It is almost always best to use someone else's product when you are designing your first. Roger Linn (https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/) gave me some fantastic advice a couple years ago when I was trying to design switch caps: "Do you want to be a company that designs switch caps or one that designs synthesizers?" and that stuck. I don't want to design switch caps, so I bought them off the shelf, contracted someone to design my own, and moved on.

So to that end... just buy a couple keybeds from Fatar or someone else, or just grab a synth you already have or buy one off ebay and harvest the keybed from that (often times much cheaper than buying direct!)

Don't be afraid to spend money on tools. If you find something difficult, like soldering, I have not once regretted spending money on better tools. They grow with you and save you hundreds if not thousands of hours of unnecessary frustration. When you know you need a tool, find a way to get it.

Maybe I should make a blog post about this... hmm

Hope that helps!

Check out Daisy DSP from ElectroSmith. They have an entire platform you can build your own synth upon. Many new EuroRack modules being released over the last ~1.5 years are built upon the Daisy SDK.

Here is the GitHub https://github.com/electro-smith/DaisySP

For an excellent implementation of C++ embedded audio DSP, checkout the DaisySP project and associated hardware. The libDaisy audio drivers abstract this block processing well.

There is a github page for this that has downloadable firmware and a link to the firmware programmer which suggests that it’s running on a Daisy. Although it would be ethically super questionable at best, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to reverse engineer.