Readit Newsstagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
Give it some time.
I feel like the newer (ish) tools such as Strudel, and also this here Loopmaster, have a much better toolset for producing stuff that actually sounds great (vs just purely the novelty of "look im coding beats"). Like, Strudel comes with an extensive sample bank of actually quality samples (vs relying on synthesis out of some sense of purity), and also comes with lots of very decent sounding effects and filters and the likes.
Combine that with the ability to do generative stuff in a way that Ableton, FL Studio or Renoise are never going to get you, I won't be surprised if people invent some cool new genres with these tools eventually.
Basically, your comment reads a bit like saying demoscene makes no sense because you can make any video better with Blender and DaVinci Resolve. And this obviously isn't true given the sheer overload of spectacularly great demos out there whose unique esthetic was easy to obtain because they're code, not video. (find "cdak" by Quite for an on-the-nose example).
I'm going to be surprised if this new wave of music coding tools will not result in some madly weird new electronic music genres.
Obviously there's plenty of stuff these tools are terrible for (like your example of nuanced instrument parts), but don't dismiss the kinds of things they're going to turn out to be amazing at.
What I like in comparison to sample-based software like Tidal and Strudel is exactly the ability to create very novel and interesting sounds using synthesis, something which I prefer. Genres like Techno rely a lot on timbre novelty.
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
the great advantage over DAWs etc is that you can name things and slowly build your own bespoke tools... for this work all timing was done in reference to the words rather than beats and bars - I can re-flow the whole piece by tapping through the syllables on my space-key. Something that would be totally impossible in a traditional platform!
In loopmaster you can define functions and abstract slowly and build your tools as well. Not yet with callbacks but it's in the works to do more complex SuperCollider-style stuff.
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
here's a whole opera from a Star Trek episode I coded in Supercollider - can indeed code things other than EDM... (its a screen grab - being synthesized in real time)
Sign up please and teach us.
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
I've actually tried all of the approaches that you've mentioned over the years, and - for my needs - they're not that compelling at the end of the day.
Sure it might be cool to use cellular automata to generate rhythms, or pick notes from a diatonic scale, or modulate signals, but without a rhyme or reason or _very_ tight constraints the music - more often than not - ends up feeling unfocused and meandering.
These methods may be able to generate a bar or two of compelling material, but it's hard to write long musical "sentences" or "paragraphs" that have an arc and intention to them. Or where the individual voices are complementing and supporting one another as they drive towards a common effect.
A great deal of compelling music comes from riding the tightrope between repetition and surprising deviations from that scheme. This quality is (for now) very hard to formalize with rules or algorithms. It's a largely intuitive process and is a big part of being a compelling writer.
I think the most effective music comes from the composer having a clear idea of where they are going musically and then using the tools to supplement that vision. Not allowing them to generate and steer for you.
-----
As an aside, I watch a lot of Youtube tutorials in which electronic music producers create elaborate modulation sources or Max patches that generate rhythms and melodies for them. A recurring theme in many of these videos is an approach of "let's throw everything at the wall, generate a lot of unfocused material, and then winnow it down and edit it into something cool!" This feels fundamentally backwards to me. I understand why it's exciting and cool when you're starting out, but I think the best music still comes from having a strong grasp of the musical fundamentals, a big imagination, and the technical ability to render it with your tools and instruments.
----
To your final point, I think the best example of this hybrid generative approach you're describing are Autechre. They're really out on the cutting edge and carving their own path. Their music is probably quite alienating because it largely forsakes melody and harmony. Instead it's all rhythm and timbre. I think they're a positive example of what generative music could be. They're controlling parameters on the macro level. They're not dictating every note. Instead they appear to be wrangling and modulating probabilities in a very active way. It's exciting stuff.
When you learn to use it you can throw a lot of intention into it, knowing the output even before you hit play. Yes, you can go the other way and "subtract" your way out of a chaos, but you can also intentionally piece together the components and produce an output you imagined beforehand. The missing pieces here for this format, my instinct tells me, are layers of abstraction or additional UI elements that will help in composing a final piece, using code for the fundamental components plus something else that hasn't been invented yet or noone has thought of glueing it together.
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
Is there a way to sidechain the bass to a compressor with the kick as an input? otherwise the low end is very muddy.
Yes, there is a `sidechain` function designed specifically for this. I wanted to keep this tutorial simple so I skipped a lot of mixing techniques or were left as an exercise to the reader, but I will try to cover those as well in future tutorials. Sign up to get notified for when they arrive!
For now you can see how it's done here[0] on line 139. I pretty much use it on every other track I've made as well.
[0]: https://loopmaster.xyz/loop/6221a807-9658-4ea0-bfec-8925ccf8...
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
yes exactly, and when I say "quantization of every dimension of composition" I mean an application of quantization to every aspect of composition not just pitch and rhythm.
Quantization and repetition are what some genres depend on. It won't be the right instrument for a Rock ballad, but for a Techno track you need this kind of "everything being quantized". That said, in loopmaster you can add swing and noise to the note offsets to humanize a sequence, a lot is left to the imagination and ability of the creator.
stagas commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
I was surprised at the audible difference it made to reset the RNG seed for the hi-hat noise function every time it triggered. I’m curious what the justification for doing this is—does the randomness arise from the geometry of the hi-hat itself and not the way you hit it? Is the idea to imitate the sound of sample-based percussion?
My understanding is that because it's a very small sample, it's basically a combination of a subset of sine waves, and because we're very sensitive to the nuances of high-pitched sounds, even small changes in that space make a lot of difference. Every RNG seed produces a different sounding hihat, and if you don't reset it, it continues producing different hihats, which is unnatural. Another explanation is also to resemble sample-based audio, but perhaps it's all of these things combined.
It's still clipping terribly in my browser