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Re: [sc-users] How did you learn SC? (was: Textures, drones)
I'll do this quick.
I was initiated bay Mr. Vega who still composes and leads his life with SC. At the beginning I couldn't do a thing except run his patches and have fun with his amp triggers. Then I made my diploma in classical guitar and was looking for the kick, didn't wanted to make a concert career, and exactly the same year they started a music informatics program at my university. As soon as it started I kept asking if we learn SC and if we can so some projects with it. Everything was Max based... I even bought the student license for 9 months. I hated it and used it only a month. We got a course with an SC aficionado, who used SC for the synthesis and mixed everything in ProTools. Our institute director saw we were making interesting stuff with SC so after a year amazingly we had a SC class and the teachers were nothing more than AdC and jrh. We rediscovered SC in ways we never imagined (me and my classmates) and since then SC is a heavy part of our study, at least we try to push it. Last teacher was Hannes, and we had lots of fun and learn a lot. Now I'm tutoring the younger ones and get them ready when the big masters come to show us the light so the don't have to lean to much in the basics. It has worked quite well I think. We now have 2 SC-based laptop ensembles/bands fully functional and concerting (one of them at the symposium) and hoping there are going to be more of them, and composers making great stuff with SC.
That's the story on how I learned SuperCollider and how it became our daily bread in Karlsruhe city, hopefully soon one of the SC strong cities in Germany ^^
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 8:34 PM, Jonatan Liljedahl
<lijon@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And here's my long and boring story:
I've been interested in music and technology since I was a kid. Started trying to code BASIC on my C64 at the age of 8, then moved over to pascal on a 8086 machine running at blasting 10MHz :), then I found C and that's what I still mostly use for "real" software development, along with Objective-C, some _javascript_, Python and plain old shellscripts.
Before I had my C64, I had already started to get interested in sound synthesis, using my moms DX7. I was amazed that I could make my own sounds that was never heard before! But I could never find exactly the kind of sounds I was looking for, and after some years I came across analog synthesizers and the sound hit me right in the heart. Since I was also interested in electronics, I decided to build my own and I started to make homegrown analogue synths (and dreadlocks). At this time I was rather fundamentalist about the analogue "magic" and hated everything digital when it came to sound and music. But soon I wanted to have more precise structural control, and built a CV/Gate interface connected to the parport of an old 486, running custom software. So now it was a hybrid system, computer controlled analogue synthesis: http://kymatica.com/uploads/Hardware/gear.jpg
Then I did a 2-year education in composition in Visby, where Jesper Elén (reading this list I think) had a course in SC. I was quite impressed by the flexibility of both language and synth, but felt that it was too much distance between my ideas and trying to understand how to implement it in SC, and I thought SC was a bit messy.. (which it is ;) Also, I still was in love with my analogue gear and was not interested in doing DSP. I also tried out Pd, ChucK and Max/MSP (the latter a standard in swedish contemporary music composition involving live electronics).
The big change came somewhat slowly while doing a bachelor in electroacoustic composition at the royal collage of music, Stockholm. There I met CSound in a one-week course, and realized that using computers for synthesis could be _really_ powerful and flexible compared to having to build or buy all the analogue synthesizer modules I wanted... ;) Also I integrated csound with my first version of AlgoScore. But after using csound for a while I started to be annoyed by it's limitations. At this time I had somewhat forgot about SC and didn't thought about taking a look at it again.
But then, one day, I was getting some gear at Fylkingen (an organization and venue for experimental art and music), and it happened to be at the same moment as Fredrik Olofsson was having a SC-workshop there. So I sneaked in just to have a look and a chat with my friends taking the workshop. And a light of pure understanding came upon me, and I realized that SC was everything I had missed in csound, that all the power and flexibility and openness was there! I went straight home, installed SC and since that night I've been using SC for everything, especially sound synthesis. I still have my homegrown analogue modular but it's seldom used, even though I replaced the CV/Gate interface with an Arduino that speaks USB.
PS. btw, my mom still has her DX7..
/Jonatan
--
Juan Gabriel Alzate Romero
rukano@xxxxxxxxx