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Making Chiptune Music using Sonic Pi v2.0

Warning: this might not work on a RaspberryPi yet

I was curious about making retro gaming sounds using Sonic Pi. A couple of months and a lot of Googling later, here's the original Mario Bros theme as it was heard on the NES console.

I'm (just about) old enough to remember rushing home from school to play this game at Philip Boucher's house, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV till my feet got pins and needles. Working out how to recreate it for Sonic Pi was a lot of fun!

Getting the sounds of the NES chip

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How to run chordino on a batch of audio files

Method 1 - sonic annotator

I'm working on a mac here so I'm assuming you have bash/terminal available. If you're on Windows you could try setting up Windows Subsytem for Linux maybe? (WSL)

• Open a terminal, get the version of sonic-annotator for your OS from here: https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/sonic-annotator/files
• Move the downloaded file to your preferred location and extract it (tar -xvf sonic-annotator-1.6-macos.tar.gz was the command I used)
• Open a terminal, then cd to the sonic-annotator-1.6-macos folder that just got created in the last step
• find the name of the chordino plugin like so:

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import pretty_midi as pm
import json


def get_syncpoint_downbeat_times(syncpoints):
    downbeat_times = []
    for syncpoint in syncpoints:
        if len(syncpoint) == 2 or syncpoint[2] == 0:
            downbeat_times.append(syncpoint[1])
    return downbeat_times

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live_loop :foo do
  with_fx :echo, mix: 0.3 do
    sample :elec_tick if spread(2,7).tick

    pattern1 = (knit :a3, 1, :d3, 1, :g3, 1)
    pattern2 = (knit :a3, 1, :d3, 1, :g3, 1, :a0, 1)
    pattern3 = (knit :a3, 1, :d3, 1, :g3, 1, :a5, 1)

    structure = (knit pattern1, 128, pattern2, 32, pattern3, 32).tick(:structure)

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$ ./chord-parser -c Cmaj7
{
  input: {
    symbol: 'Cmaj7',
    rootNote: 'C',
    descriptor: 'maj7',
    parsableDescriptor: 'maj7',
    modifiers: [ 'add7' ],
    notationSystem: 'english'
  },

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# DUBSTEP
# Combines ideas from my other gists
current_bpm = 140.0 
use_bpm current_bpm

# WOBBLE BASS 
define :wob do
  use_synth :dsaw
  lowcut = note(:E1) # ~ 40Hz
  highcut = note(:G8) # ~ 3000Hz

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Arpeggiator in Sonic Pi

This is a work in progress

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Using Sonic Pi to practice guitar

This is an implementation of a scale exercise widely used in jazz teaching. It's sometimes known as the "big scale" exercise.

Explanation

Let's say you practice the saxophone and you want to make sure you know all your major scales. One way to test this would be to play the scale within the limits of your instrument - saxophones have a lowest note and a highest note (from :Db3 to :A5 at concert pitch in Sonic-Pi speak - see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alto_saxophone#Range - assuming you don't get fancy with harmonics!)

Playing an Eb major scale over the whole range of the instrument would mean playing from :D3 to Ab5 (concert) as the lowest and highest notes available don't appear in the scale (:Db3 and :A5 respectively). When you hit the upper or lower limit you just reverse the direction and carry on going.

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Getting LADSPA plugins working on Sonic Pi

This is an evil experiment at the moment but it works

• Download and install LMMS from http://lmms.io
• Run the attached SuperCollider file to create the synthdef locally (Overtone doesn't have ladspa yet)
• patch the named ruby files as per the other attachments
• start Sonic Pi

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Came close with this one but couldn't quite get anything as clear as the original.

Audio demo of the following code: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ejuwpd5pp60pn3r/vocoder_sc_demo.mp3?dl=0

Source audio files along with technical documents describing the operation of the original are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6znkjoy2p1ejk42/AAC_i_359F-jRznPfv8-yEN6a?dl=0