How to Synthesize a House Loop

I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).

The coding aspect is novel I'll admit, and something an audience may find interesting, but I've yet to hear any examples of live coded music (or even coded music) that I'd actually want to listen to. They almost always take the form of some bog-standard house music or techno, which I don't find that enjoyable.

Additionally, the technique is fun for demonstrating how sound synthesis works (like in the OP article), but anything more complex or nuanced is never explored or attempted. Sequencing a nuanced instrumental part (or multiple) requires a lot of moment-to-moment detail, dynamics, and variation. Something that is tedious to sequence and simply doesn't play to this formats' strengths.

So again, I want to integrate this skill into my music production tool set, but aside from the novelty of coding live, it doesn't appear well-suited to making interesting music in real time. And for offline sequencing there are better, more sophisticated tools, like DAWs or trackers.

What‘s going on with all these code-2-music tools these days? See other front page discussion about strudel.cc [1]. Did I enter an established bubble or is there a rising trend? It‘s incredible, though, what people are able to obtain with it, especially when built-up during a live session [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478 [2] Nice example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GWXCCBsOMSg

SO fun!!!

fun experiment to get you tinkerers started, skip to the bottom play The Complete Loop - https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/how-to-synthesize-a-house-l...

Then, on line 21, with `pat('[~ e3a3c4]*4',(trig,velocity,pitches)->`.

Change *4 to *2 and back to *4, to reduce the interval that the "Chords" play. If you do it real fast with your backspace + 2 or backspace + 4 key, you can change the chords in realtime, and kinda vibe with the beat a little bit.

Definitely recommend wearing headphones to hear the entire audio spectrum (aka bass).*

The language certainly looks nice! Is it open source? I think it makes sense for this kind of tool, since it's inherently "hackery". I mean people who want to write music with code also probably want the ability to understand and modify any part of the stack, it's the nature of the audience.

I'll shamelessly plug my weirdo version in a Forth variant, also a house loop running in the browser: https://audiomasher.org/patch/WRZXQH

Well, maybe it's closer to trance than house. It's also considerably more esoteric and less commented! Win-win?

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?

Very cool. https://loopmaster.xyz/generate is super fun also.

I really want something like this as a VST plugin.

I don't imagine making a full song out of this, but it would be a great instrument to have.

If you like this then check out Oxygene pt4 in JS[0].

[0] https://dittytoy.net/ditty/59b8a8d54d

It strikes me as kind of weird (or maybe a red flag?) that there's no landing page nor an About page.