Weeknotes 12
- No weeknotes last week. My 7-month old baby faced some stiff competition in the “keeping Chris awake at night game” from bitter rival “the absolute state of the world”. The former won. In your face world!
- I’ve been working on my own on two projects for Oxford University this week. After pairing with Paul last week it’s been good to force myself to consolidate what I’ve learnt about React by adding some features on my own.
- One of the many things I learnt while working with Paul was the heroku
local command. A handy
shortcut for the
dotenvandProcfilefiddling I was doing before. - N- decided he wanted to try wearing pants again on the same day our washing machine packed up. We tried to get it fixed (by the excellently-named and highly recommended Spin Doctor) but unfortunately it’s a gonner. Our new machine arrived yesterday and it connects to the internet. WHY?!
-
I found a bit more time to play with TidalCycles this week. First I wanted to make my drums bounce a little by adding some ghost notes - quieter hits played before or after a main hit. I came up with
d1 $ superimpose (sometimes ((1/16) <~) . (# gain 0.5)) $ sound "[kick ~ kick ~]"this sometimes plays a lower volume kick drum a 16th before the hit on the 1 or 3. Using superimpose means I can specify the pattern in terms of the “main” rhythm and let the function take care of creating the pre-delayed copy.
In the tidalcycles tutorial that runs on Tidal Club I also learnt about chop for slicing and rearranging samples. Putting the two techniques together I made this loop:
I’m enjoying Tidal. I’m not sure I’ll get into the whole algorave thing, but I can quickly make patterns that would take a lot of clicking and copy-pasting in a DAW. I’d still like to get some external MIDI control hooked up so that I can spend less time looking at the screen and more time “playing”.
Reading
- Basile’s weeknotes on data journalism, freelancing and parenting.
- Parse don’t validate (via Ben)
Listening
- Washed Up Emo Podcast (via Dan)