Playing with Studel

Playing around with Strudel

A few years ago, I was looking for a new music engraving app as I became a digital nomad after the buyout of Sibelius. While I found Musescore to be fine in most cases, I did end up folding and buying a version of Dorico while on sale.

But on my journey, I found a notation software that I had heard of but knew almost nothing about. Lilypond is a music engraving program that puts it’s emphasis on file formatting and using a coding language as its main UI.

This blew my mind as I had just dipped my toes into the world of web design and really needed something to stoke my procrastination tendencies.

After a while, learning the coding language became a bit tedious but I definitely saw the value in having an application as robust as Lilypond.

So I continued to search and found the Strudel/Tidal project. And once again my mind was blow. Strudel allows you to code music and listen to the playback in real time; add and modify effects, sound samples, sequence and more. Holy shit this was going to be awesome.

Then I totally let it become one of those things that “I’ll learn one day when I have a few free hours.”

Well today is that day and here is my first composition:

It ain’t much but I did learn the basic syntax, sequencing, and effects. What I need to learn is basic arranging and creating the right sequence to have a fully formed piece. Anyway, this is fun and I hope to get more time to explore again soon.

dg