Opinionated Advice for SuperCollider Beginners

[dylan]

@nathan

In college I built a fairly elaborate live performance system in SC, and it was alright. But soon after I graduated, I dropped the idea of writing a layer between myself and SC and just wrote every piece as its own .scd file. As a result, my musical productivity skyrocketed, because I could make music without “being a programmer” and I could spend a lot more time on sound design and tangible musical materials. I’m currently happier than I’ve ever been with my SC workflow, and I’d also say my music got better but I’ll let you be the judge .

I experienced something similar. I was losing motivation to write supercollider code after writing code all day at work. My productivity increased once I stopped caring about the usual things when developing in a professional context.

My music code doesn’t need to scale, it doesn’t need to be readable or maintained by anyone else, it doesn’t need to be DRY, etc etc. It just needs to sound good! If I were collaborating, then ok sure, I would have a different approach.

[dkmayer]

@nathan

Would be interested to hear any thoughts on these. Any high-level advice you’d give to SC beginners?

Just discovered this lately. Certainly a lot of very useful recommendations! Some of them with a strong opinion – I might not agree with – but that’s ok.
I especially like the emphasis on practice, keeping things technically clean and simple and – at the end – LISTENING to the results. Having said that, sometimes curiosity inevitably leads you to things that are not simple …

One side-remark concerning the Amplitude UGen you are mentioning in the collection of SuperCollider Tips: it’s not only the default settings, it’s mathematically wrong in more than one regard – a bad bug, as Julian described it (my example of June 4, 2020 is clearer than my first post). However, Amplitude is still of practical usage:

Amplitude: incorrect results if input signal is not at the same rate

[dkmayer]

@nathan

Some are more personal and motivational, where the artist underestimates the feedback loop between building an instrument and determining whether it’s creatively inspiring. Only a minority of them actually end up making and releasing music with their systems.

I can only partially confirm what you have been experiencing. Indeed, I’ve developed several classes for miSCellaneous_lib that I have never used musically in serious projects (E.g.: Sieve / Psieve patterns, ironically, I know that others did use them). However, I’ve used several classes intensely over a long period of time: VarGui is serving my GUI needs since 2007 or so for all of my projects. I’ve used it in combination with PLx Pattern classes for Pattern-based granulation very often.
What also happens quite often is that classes turn out to be useful with a delay of several years. I’ve used PbindFx – which took me three years to develop – for the first time in a larger project last year.

[dylan]

@dkmayer

I especially like the emphasis on practice, keeping things technically clean and simple and – at the end – LISTENING to the results. Having said that, sometimes curiosity inevitably leads you to things that are not simple …

Yes so true. That’s my preference - for curiosity to lead me towards complexity, rather than racing towards it, as I have in the past. I guess there are some parallels there with premature optimization.

Edit: And yes your miSCellaneous_lib is super cool and very useful! Thank you.