Some Strudel tips
I’ve been doing a bunch of livecoding/algorave stuff in Strudel, and it’s great fun. You can make all kinds of fun sounds through experimentation, and the docs are fantastic, but I’ve been itching to make a kind of “guide” that catalogues certain winning formulas for electronic music that I frequently turn to.
Here are some scattered thoughts that would make it into such a guide. Each code block is executable: press Ctrl+Enter to start audio and Ctrl+. (period) to stop.
Hi-hats
Many “house-y” rhythms sound good with hh*16. Just don’t make them too loud. It sounds good to play them “softly, then a bit louder” on each beat.
(Also, claps and snares like to be on beats 2 and 4.)
Ribbon
If you play random notes in a scale, it sounds, well, random. But if you loop a single random measure, it will start to sound like music! In the words of Adam Neely: repetition legitimizes. In Strudel, the ribbon function .rib can slice out a bit of a (random) pattern and loop it.
You can even do things like .rib("52 52 52 <52 3>", 1) to change the pattern up every other bar.
Randomize everything
Most parameters sound fun when randomized over a small range. It can make even a single note sound interesting. Also, randomly pitch notes up or down by an octave! This kind of “accent” with rarely sounds fun.
You can combine this with rib, but you don’t have to.
Chords, bass, drums, melody
This is a solid four-ingredient recipe for making a tune sound “full.”
Try muting parts with _$ to see what it feels like to have
“no chords” or “no bass” for a bit. It’s fun to DJ like this.
(Oh! I like this trick for making nice and “full” chord voicings: play the same chords at two different anchors, then pan them left and right.)
Fun samples
There are loads of fun samples in github:tidalcycles/dirt-samples and github:yaxu/clean-breaks.
Meanwhile, github:yaxu/clean-breaks catalogs some nice drum loops for breakbeats.
I like using Vocaloid samples in Strudel… There are some excellent stems licensed under BY-NC-SA on Jamie Paige’s stems page, from which I took the Strawberry vocal for teto in github:lynn/sounds/main/vocaloid.
More?
Maybe that’s plenty of tips for now – I can feel myself veering off track. But I might write more about Strudel in the future. Let me know what you think on Bluesky or email me (lynn@foldr.moe).