Patterns
By WahSp on April 24, 2026 9:02 pm
This is something quite different from what I've done so far, while also somewhat of a continuation of things I've tried the past weeks.
I've been fascinated with live coding ever since I've seen someone submit a video about it during the Dirtywave M8 Jungle community compo. I've played around with Strudel a bit, but switched to Tidal Cycles at some point. I prefer Tidal Cycles because it uses SuperCollider as its sound engine, which is very powerful. Also, I found it easier to use midi with Tidal Cycles and SuperCollider. I've played with Tidal Cycles during the Christmas Holidays, but created nothing substantial (also got lost in exploring SuperCollider at some point 
).
The idea to do something with live coding for Weekly Beats crossed my mind a couple of times this year, but the urge became stronger recently. One reason for this is that I wanted to do more with the shitload of nice VST plugins that I've collected over the year. For example, I have a license to u-he's Zebra 3, which released last Monday. I also have almost all other u-he's plugins and they're all great. I just never feel inspired when using the 'classic' DAW. I am exploring Renoise because I like the tracker interface, but I think I need some time before it really clicks with me. Tidal Cycles hooked up with some virtual midi channels works best for me so far.
Another thing that inspired me to pick up Tidal Cycles again is listening to Caterina Barbieri's work over the past weeks (ever since I saw her perform). Her music is all about playing with (often repetitive) patterns. Tidal Cycles is also very pattern-oriented, so it seemed like a good way to explore this approach to making music more.
Anyway, that's what I ended up doing. I'm not brilliant with Tidal Cycles yet, but I've learned a few useful tricks already. I set up a project that sends midi from Tidal Cycles to Ableton Live, where I have Zebra 3, Diva, Arturia's LoFi, The Legend HZ, and a sampler with a breakbeat as instruments. I of course also set up a bunch of FX: Reverbs, u-he's excellent MFM, and some others. I created a bunch of patterns in Tidal Cycles over the past couple of days that I liked.
So eventually, I decided to hook up a Launch Kontrol XL that I still have lying around and to record a kind of live jam with this setup. I didn't want to redo this over and over, so aimed at doing one take. I did end up having to redo it once, because I accidentally silenced all patterns in Tidal Cycles at some point (I still confuse some of the shortcuts ).
The result is rough around the edges, but I think it is a pretty cool start. At least I had a lot of fun making this. Looking forward to learning more about live coding.
Just a heads up: it starts slow and at low volume. Don't crank up the volume too quickly.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
