Resistance is Futile…
bad ideas…
If you are new to Tidal cycles and your background is coming from traditional step sequencers one thing that can help you get up and running quickly is to model your patterns in the same way you would a step sequencer. You can do this rather easily using the ~ and stack as I’ll show you here.
testing is science…
Part of my latest evolution in art projects has been the desire to generate and control visuals. Previously I’ve been using Resolume Arena for doing some video transformations, and eventually using it’s FFGL plugins to kind of generate visuals based on MIDI. This was great, but the resources used by Resolume are not light, and really it seemed a bit overkill for what I’m wanting to do.
Through the Lurk chat I stumbled on VEDA which GLSL runtime environment for the Atom editor. This kind of became a something I really wanted to check out since I’m using Atom for all of my Tidal patterns. Once I found out that VEDA had MIDI capabilities I started digging in more
testing is science…
After updating SuperDirt and Tidal to the 1.0-Dev branches, there are some new lines of code that need to be run. I figured this was a good time to watch, and pay attention to, Kindohm’s Tutorial #18: Atom Boot Configs
I wanted to post the tidal.boot that I’m using for reference in case anyone else is trying to tidy things up. I’ve modified mine so that it runs the needed MIDI declarations as well as a couple extras for reseting the cycle clock and executing a one shot sample/note. Resetting the cycle clock has been useful for me when analyzing patterns and trying to figure out what is happening from the 0 cycle, and the oneshot function is EXTREMELY useful for all kinds of things.
bad ideas…
Anyone that has dipped into any programming language, or any commendable skill knows that practice makes perfect. I’d wager that most of us that are using Tidal are doing this constantly…I mean even kindohm did a pattern a day for a full year (which I would attribute as directly leveling up his skills). I’m trying to do something similar but since MIDI is my digs, that is what I’m using.
In this post I’ll be showing you a quick and simple method for visualizing your patterns using Tidal Midi and Ableton (but any DAW that can record MIDI should work).
script it…walk away.
I remember a time when I used to come up with witty or comical titles for my posts, but now it’s pretty much just that which my brain is left with after somewhat agonizing experimentation.
This post is about Tidal MIDI which is really just Tidal patterns utilizing MIDI functions from SuperDirt. At the time of this post the stable MIDI features (for me at least) are found in the 1.0-Dev branches of SuperDirt and Tidal. Getting these installed can be kind of a PITA so I’ll try to document that as well.
script it…walk away.
Tidal in a nutshell is a live coding language that allows you to create complex patterns riding on the SuperDirt synth in SuperCollider. Im not entirely sure how I found out about Tidal but since I have it’s been a bit of a journey getting things working and experimentation to fully understand some of the things that are happening. I wanted to document some of my own findings just for the sake of reenforcing the knowledge internally as well as helping anyone that might find this while searching.
script it…walk away.
I’m sure by now most of you have discovered dbatools, a wonderful library of PowerShell functions that make life as a DBA so much better. It’s a fantastic community full of people willing to help with minimal flaming and the library itself is frequently updated.
Initially I wanted to jump on the contribution train but IRL I have jobs to consider so instaed I took more of a end user role, working on familiarizing myself with PowerShell in order to tap into the power of dbatools. After writing some DBA specific utilities I started looking at the bigger picture of what I could do across the infrastructure with PowerShell.
script it…walk away.
people are talking about me again… o_o
However instead of plots to overthrow my kingdom, or curses that would cause me to eat pie and lose weight, or saying my name three times in a mirror so that I become summoned and forced to bust a cap…instead of stuff like THAT…they are props for working on some code!
I made some new changes and fixed an embarrassing bug in my previous contribution for the sp_DatabaseRestore. In an ideal world I would just skip the part of this post where I point out my mistakes and explain what they were, however Github does a great job at keeping history so…
win by decapitation…
No one would notice if I didn’t post about it, but for that one person in my mind that loved reading codepimp.org, I thought I’d share why the site was removed.
just me baby…
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years blogging and trying to keep up on different platforms, across what could be seen as multiple identities. One was for public consumption which included employers, another for music, another for amusement, etc., etc.
Aside from it being a huge PITA to keep content updated and active across so many places, it also started to seem like less of me, and just little compartmentalized tidbits that never really represented who I am. Everything started to feel impersonal. I can’t really explain it, but the Database Engineer was starting to feel like a completely different person from the Artist, the Husband, the Father, the…Tim.