howto_co34pt_liveCode

What this repo is

Hello!

I live code under the name co￥ﾡpt (bandcamp, soundcloud), and have been performing since 2014, including for Algoraves, gigs, theatre and dance.

This repo is an ongoing collection of materials about my live coding practice using SuperCollider. I'm hoping to use it to post writing, how-tos and guides, helpful code, techniques, frameworks and whatever else might be useful to anyone wanting to learn to live code using SuperCollider, or anyone who already does. It's a clone/version of and companion to my co34pt_livecode repo, which contains finished sets from gigs alongside my setup code and samples.

I'm putting together this repo because I wish there'd been such a thing when I had been learning to live code in SuperCollider, (or at least I wish there'd been one i'd been able to find). There are a bunch of great tutorials for SuperCollider out there (I'd particularly recommend this set by Eli Fieldsteel), but I found advice on live coding in SuperCollider reasonably hard to come by, and was fortunate enough to have an experienced live coder as a teacher. An awful lot of the examples I give and techniques I talk about can be found in the documentation of SuperCollider, but finding it can be a little frustrating and examples can often be written in quite different styles. I'm aiming for this repo to be a curated set of resources following a central style, with various parts of the language explained in the context of the kind of live coding I do, with musical examples of how I would use these techniques in actual live sets.

For the resources here i'm assuming a basic knowledge of how to use SuperCollider and programming concepts generally, because i'm not a great person to explain this. If you're totally new to SuperCollider and programming i'd either recommend the Eli Fieldsteel videos previously mentioned, Supercollider's inbuilt turotials, or Nick Collins's tutorials. The more advanced tutorials won't be necessary for the most part, but a familiarity with executing SuperCollider code, what UGens are and basic syntax will be super helpful.

The materials in this repo are by no means the best way to live code using SuperCollider, or the most efficient way to solve any problems, but they are the ways that have worked for me personally. If you spot any glaring issues in this repo, please fork and change/correct! I'd also welcome guest contributions, although I maybe should rename this repo if i'm going to do that so as not to have it under my 'umbrella' name.

I'm also continually looking for a better way to manage this repo as a learning resource. I've figured GitHub is probably the best way to do it as there is version control, all resources can be hosted here along with details on how to use them, and it can easily be packaged and downloaded, the only thing missing being a 'comments' section.

If you want to get in touch with me about this repo, please do so on Github, Twitter (same username) or via theseancotterill atsymbol live period com. If there is anything not working, please open an issue/make a pull request and I will look at it as soon as I can.

A note about formats: The examples and code in this repo will be tested using Linux, in my case Kubuntu 16.04+, but as SuperCollider is cross-platform this shouldn't matter too much for the most part.