Posts

• Simplified Hardware Arx

  I’m taking an online workshop on building electronic musical instruments. So last week I put together a sketch, in blog post form, of what it might look like to make a hardware Arx — which is to say, a hardware version of my Ruby breakbeat improviser Archaeopteryx (renamed for simplicity).

• Hardware Arx

  Back in 2007 and 2008, I put together a system in Ruby which emulated a hardware drum machine, but changed one piece of the classic design: where most drum machines map beats to drums using booleans, this used floats. The floats expressed probability. Since then Arturia, Elektron, and other companies have released drum machines which allow you to do similar things, although they default every probability to 1.0, and you need to do some menu-diving in order to change that.

• Software-Mediated Drum Circle

  Here’s a rough sketch for a software-mediated drum circle. This could be a good fit for Burning Man, a music festival, or similar settings.

• A House Track in SuperCollider

  The first several posts on this blog show you how a house beat, its drums, and its riser sound work. Next I’m going to show you how I built a short house track — around two and a half minutes long — entirely in SuperCollider.

• A Riser in SuperCollider

  In the two previous posts, I’ve shown how a house beat in SuperCollider works. At the end of every eight bars, this house beat includes a riser — a buildup sound used to increase tension prior to a transition. This is the most complex sound in the beat, so I’ve saved it for last.

• Synth Drums in SuperCollider

  In the first post on this blog, I started an introduction to a GitHub repo which defines a house beat. In this followup post, I’m going to look at how the drums in this beat work.

• A House Beat in SuperCollider

  There are at least three open source live-coding systems in popular languages — Sonic Pi (Ruby), Overtone (Clojure), and Tidal Cycles (Haskell) — which all share the same foundation: a system called SuperCollider. I’m going to show you how to build a basic house beat in SuperCollider.