Using Samples

Educator notes

Educator Intro

Transcript

Hi, I’m Sanna from Mehackit - welcome back! Hopefully you had a great start with Sonic Pi last time. This lesson takes you and your students to the most engaging part of Sonic Pi, playing samples and making beats! In practice, you'll learn how to create common time drum loops and build the basic rock drum pattern. We’ll keep it super simple so anyone can understand the theory behind it! You’re already familiar with repeating stuff by coding and, we’ll introduce a new command for looping called live_loop. With live_loops you can easily create instruments that play at the same time - concurrently and infinitely. When you’re working with live_loops you’re already practicing live coding, which means you're letting the music run, making changes in the code and hearing those changes without stopping the music! There are two exercises in the end of this lesson that let you work on those drum beats and create looping layers into your music.

Length of the chapter: 60 - 120min

Adjust the length of the chapter according to the time you have at hand. There are more detailed lesson plans on the next page.

Learning Objectives

The Student…

…will get to know the sample library of Sonic Pi
…can code a basic looping 4/4 drum beat
…can understand concurrency with live_loops
…can use commenting to document the code
…can use comments to prevent code from running

Slides and Lesson Plans

You can use the slides below to introduce the second chapter to the students. There are speaker notes in the slides that explain them. To see the speaker notes, click Options > Open Speaker Notes in the bottom panel of the slides or press s. There are similar slides in the Educator Intro of every chapter.

See also the lesson plans below the slides!

Slides

Plan 1 - Structured Lessons (90-120 min)

Time	What?
10 min	Scrum-routine: All students (or pairs of students) tell after each other the following things: 1) what they were doing in the end of the previous lesson and 2) if they had any challenges they would need help with. If students are shy to speak when others are listening, you can and talk with them individually later on the lesson. It doesn't matter if some students are still doing the tasks of the first chapter. You can help those students personally after introducing the second chapter to everyone.
10 min	Introduce the second chapter with the slides above.
10-20 min	Students start the second chapter alone or in pairs and go through the topics Using Samples. Ask the students to raise their hand if they have any challenges. Walk around the classroom while the students are working and discuss briefly with each student. Talk especially with those who have had challenges or seem to lack motivation. Make sure that every student has some kind of meaningful goal for this lesson.
10 min	Ask the students if they have had any challenges so far. If needed, explain the 4/4 rhythm by showing code from Sonic Pi
10-20 min	Students continue with the topic Programming Those Beats!. Ask students to raise their hand if they have challenges.
15 min	Reflection discussion: What has been most interesting? Do you have ideas of what to express with the new programming tools? Introduction to the Exercises - In the first exercise the students make a single live_loop beat - The second exercise is the submission. The students will make several live_loops that play together - Give a time-limit: 10 minutes!
20-30 min	Students work on the exercises
5 min	You can end the lesson (or start the next lesson) by going through a couple of loops the students have made, if they are willing to show them.

Plan 2 - Freely flowing lessons (90-120 min)

Time to complete	Activity
10 min	Scrum-routine: All students (or pairs of students) tell after each other the following things: 1) what they were doing in the end of the previous lesson and 2) if they had any challenges they would need help with. If students are shy to speak when others are listening, you can and talk with them individually later on the lesson. It doesn't matter if some students are still completing the tasks of the first chapter. You can help those students personally after introducing the second chapter to everyone.
5 min	Set a goal for the second (and third) lesson: complete the second chapter. Show the Multiple Loops -exercise of the chapter to the students with a projector and speakers. Ask the students to start from the topic Using Sampels and then continue forward. Ask the students to raise their hand if they have a any questions.
40-70 min	Walk around in the classroom while the students are working and discuss briefly with each student. Talk especially with those who have had challenges or seem to lack motivation. Make sure that every student has some kind of meaningful goal for this lesson. If you feel that students have trouble understanding 4/4 beats or live_loops, explain them to everyone together. Check the Educator Notes for more teaching tips related to these topics.
10 min	Reflection discussion: What has been most interesting? Do you have ideas of what to express with the new programming tools? Introduce the Exercises. If some students have started or completed it already, it doesn't matter. - Show an example result or show something you have coded yourself. - Give a time-limit: 10 minutes/exercise!
20 min	Students develop their own loops.
5 min	You can end the lesson (or start the next lesson) by going through a couple of loops the students have made, if they are willing to show them.

Have a Sample

Transcript

Welcome back! I'm sanna from Mehackit and I hope you've had a great start with Sonic Pi. Now you have a good idea about how to play notes and melodies. tThat's all cool but we can do so much more with Sonic Pi! Let's dig deeper by learning how to play samples and how to make some drum beats. The main command for this chapter is called sample. It's used for playing samples from Sonic Pi's sound library. Samples are recorded pieces of sound that can contain for example sounds of drums or animals or sounds of some specific place. To start playing samples open an empty buffer and write the command sample in the code editor. The cool thing is that when you press space after the sample command, you'll see a list that displays all the samples available in Sonic Pi. You don't have to remember the sample names, you just scroll down this list to discover sounds. Sample names always start with a colon and after that comes the sample category and name. Once you've chosen a sample that you want to play you just press Enter or double click. Run the program to play the sound. Nice and simple. Let's do a quick run-through of the sample categories :ambi contains cinematic and ambient samples that are great for painting various soundscapes. And let's try another one maybe the piano one the next category is :bass and this one has some crunchy samples for electronic dance music. Maybe another example let's try that one. All right. I think you should also check out the category :bd which by the way it stands for bass drum. These are some electronic kick drum samples. All right, and another example of these ones. Alright! If you're looking for some acoustic drums you can find those in the :drum category. That's a kick drum and let's look at another common drum called snare over there. Okay and there's so much more that it could take us the whole lesson to go through them. So next I think you should try playing random samples by yourself and discover your favourite ones. There are all kinds of crazy sounds in there like this: All right. By the way did you notice that I didn't press the Run button at all? There's a really handy keyboard shortcut for run and in Windows and Linux its alt + R and for Mac its command+ R remember to try that out too!

Do this

Before going any further, it’s a good idea to spend few a minutes getting to know the sample library. There are many categories of samples all with very different sounds. Check them out!

If you want to get back to the drop-down menu of samples, all you need to do is to press backspace until you hit the sample command. Then press the spacebar again to get back to the list!

What is a sample?

A soundfile

Something that you steal from others

A looping drumbeat

What is the shortcut for running code in Sonic Pi?

ctrl/cmd + q

ctrl + alt + delete

alt/cmd + r

Educator notes

Just like note names, sample names always start with a colon. An easy way to see that your syntax is correct is if the text turns pink when it is a sample name.

To get back to the sample drop-down menu, press backspace until you arrive at the word sample. Then press the spacebar again!

4/4 Drum Beat

Transcript

Now that you know how to play samples you can use that skill to make some drum patterns. Let's see how to create a simple rock drum pattern with a kick and snare drum. The first thing I want to play is the kick drum also known as the bass drum and that's how drummers usually start the pattern anyway. I like the sample :drum_heavy_kick, as soon as I find it, over there. Sounds like that. Snare drum usually follows the kick drum on the second beat. And to get to the second beat sonic PI needs to sleep for one beat. Sample and a snare drum like that. The kick should be repeated again on the third beat and snare drum on the fourth beat. So let's copy this part. And we need one more sleep here and let's see. This feels kind of slow so you can always use the command use_bpm to make things a little bit faster and I'll try with the tempo 120 - way better. I actually built a drum pattern with four beats and we can call this rhythmic part a bar. Fun fact: when a bar has four beats it has a time signature of 4/4. The first and most accented beat is called the downbeat and backbeat on the other hand is a steady pronounced rhythm on the second and fourth beat. In this case the snare drum is on the backbeat. Now write your own beat and put it inside a repeat block to make it loop. Remember that you can always use the shortcut alt+r on Windows and Linux or command+r to run your code faster.

What is a Bar?

A bar is made up of beats. The number of beats in a bar is determined by the numerator or the top number of the time signature. As you can see in the picture, 4/4 basically means that four beats make up a bar. When counting the number of beats in a bar in Sonic Pi, sleep values are the ones that matter!

It doesn't matter whether Sonic Pi plays a note, a sample or does nothing. Time is always counted by sleep values.

Take a look at how the note and sleep values relate to each other. The note in the middle is a quarter note which is equal to sleep 1. This is the beat, the pulse to which you might nod your head or tap your feet to. Note values smaller than the beat are called divisions of the beat. Every shorter note is half the length of the previous one. Similarly, values larger than the beat are called multiples because they are always twice as big as the previous one.

Do this

Build your own 4/4 drum pattern and use a repeat block to loop it.

The sleep values should add up to 4.

4.times do
    #put your samples and sleep commands here
    #the sleep values inside should add up to 4
end

Educator notes

4/4 is called a time signature in music. The time signature tells us how we count the time in a bar. The first number tells us the number of beats that go into a bar, or in other words, the number we count to. The second number determines the length of the counted beat. In the case of 4/4, one bar has four quarter notes. In Sonic Pi terms this means that one 4/4 bar has four beats of sleep 1, so a total length of sleep 4.

4/4 is the most used time signature in pop and rock music, as well as a defining feature of electronic dance music (EDM.) For this reason, it will probably sound familiar to your students. Other time signatures give a very different feel to the music because of the way we count the bars. In 3/4 we count to three, which is characteristic of waltzes, minuets and some ballads. In 2/4 we count to two, which is typical of marching music and polka.