Chapter 5 - Recreating the beep Synth

Make it work in SuperCollider

The way to do this is to get your synth working in SuperCollider first before you save it as a SynthDef and start using it in Sonic Pi.

Let’s look at some simple sounds:

{SinOsc.ar(440, 0, 0.2)}.play;

This will give us a continuous sound.

You can assign this to a variable and invoke play on it:

(f = {SinOsc.ar(440, 0, 0.2)};
f.play;)

You don’t have to wrap it in a scope ie ( and ).

Similarly when we define Synths using SynthDef we have saved them as a compiled thing with:

(SynthDef("somesynth",{
	...
	super collider code
	...
}).writeDefFile("/Users/gordonguthrie/.synthdefs"))

We can swap out the writeDefFile method with the add method like so:

(SynthDef("somesynth",{
	...
	super collider code
	...
}).add;)

We can then create a new instance of it and assign it to a variable:

a = Synth.new("somesynth");

We can pass in different values in the call to create it:

a = Synth.new("somesynth", [note: 85, release: 6, pan: 0.3, amp: 0.3]);

(This is what happens when you use the play command in Sonic Pi.)

And we can control it. First invoke the synth with a long duration:

a = Synth.new("somesynth", [note: 64, release: 60]);

then while it is playing use set to control it:

a.set("note", 75);
a.set("amp", 0.5);

Unsurprisingly set is what Sonic Pi uses under the covers to control SuperCollider synths.