Sonic Pi is very accessible and a great front end for SuperCollider and livecoding music in general.
Some others worth trying depending on your personal choice and bias for a particular PL:
Euterpea - Haskell library for music creation [0].
Extempore - Scheme-based livecoding environment with a low-level language too - xtlang [1].
Grace (Common Music) - Scheme-based livecoding with crossplatform IDE [2].
Sporth (used by AudioKit) - Forth-based, low-level livecoding of music.
I think Grace is probably the most self-contained. The single executable for Linux, Mac, and Windows comes with samples and a choice of a scheme-based language, or a more simplified, more Algol-like one called SAL.
I like extempore because of its CAAS (compiler as a service) model, scheme language, and the ability to create from the note up, or to create sounds from scratch (sine waves and such).
I splurged for the Haskell School of Music book based on the Euterpea library that was originally written by Paul Hudak, but finished by one of his students, Donya Quick. This is how I originally learned Haskell, and it was a lot of fun and educational to boot.
I used to use a live-coding setup with Sporth centered around Vim, though it has never been added to the codebase. If anyone is interested in this, please feel free to email me at thisispaulbatchelor at gmail dot com.
When I was pursuing Forth, and about to give up on doing anything beyond a file munger I wrote, I discovered Sporth, and had a blast for at least two or three weeks and kept Forth on my radar! A lot of complexity from a few lines of Sporth! What are you up to nowadays?
I think I shared this last time Sonic Pi got posted here, but Sonic Pi is also extremely flexible when you bus the MIDI output to other tools - Ableton, external synthesizers, etc. I posted a clip on IG a while back -
Played with with it when i got my first Raspberry, it was fun. There is a Vim plugin with which you get a kind of sonic-pi REPL [0], there is a newer one for Neovim too [1].
It's worth checking out the live sessions by Sam Aaron - plenty of videos on his YouTube channel. He gives an introductory talk about it here: https://youtu.be/TK1mBqKvIyU
Even if you don't know Haskell, it is a delight to improvise electronic music with this library. It comes with its own mini-language for dealing with musical patterns and can synchronize with any instrument. Very extensible, the backend uses https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt, a SuperCollider extension for dealing with synths / samples / effects.
there is a lot more friction in understanding sclang, but the server here is the same (scsynth/supernova), and to me, Sclang is really one of the most beautiful things to work with. Wish I could get paid to work with it
There is a bit more to DAW than just that. You need a highly stable and performant piece of software that accomodates all kind of plugins and hardware. Look at the Ardour source code. They have done an incredible job with it.
I also have a bunch of 'things' that have been bookmarked for years: mostly movies and articles, some projects. This stockpiling has become tsundoku for more than books [1].
On one hand, divorcing myself from the initial impulse to consume or create something helps filter down to what I am and will be truly interested in. On the obvious other hand, the backlog grows to the point where I get paralyzed by so many options and the perfect ideas in my head that I end up not doing anything.
I struggle with the same, and I have exactly the same thought process.
Occasionally, I have a filtering session when I am going through everything and narrowing them down, however extra items are appearing until the next filtering session and the same goes again. It is a vicious cycle.
Did you save off your links for the tutorials you watched etc? I've messed with SP in the past but never got comfortable with it so additional tutorials would be rad.
Some others worth trying depending on your personal choice and bias for a particular PL:
Euterpea - Haskell library for music creation [0].
Extempore - Scheme-based livecoding environment with a low-level language too - xtlang [1].
Grace (Common Music) - Scheme-based livecoding with crossplatform IDE [2].
Sporth (used by AudioKit) - Forth-based, low-level livecoding of music.
I think Grace is probably the most self-contained. The single executable for Linux, Mac, and Windows comes with samples and a choice of a scheme-based language, or a more simplified, more Algol-like one called SAL.
I like extempore because of its CAAS (compiler as a service) model, scheme language, and the ability to create from the note up, or to create sounds from scratch (sine waves and such).
I splurged for the Haskell School of Music book based on the Euterpea library that was originally written by Paul Hudak, but finished by one of his students, Donya Quick. This is how I originally learned Haskell, and it was a lot of fun and educational to boot.