Sonic Pi has built-in support for chord names which will return lists. Try it for yourself:
play chord(:E3, :minor)
Now, we’re really getting somewhere. That looks a lot more pretty than the raw lists (and is easier to read for other people). So what other chords does Sonic Pi support? Well, a lot. Try some of these:
chord(:E3, :m7)
chord(:E3, :minor)
chord(:E3, :dim7)
chord(:E3, :dom7)
We can easily turn chords into arpeggios with the function play_pattern
:
play_pattern chord(:E3, :m7)
Ok, that’s not so fun - it played it really slowly. play_pattern
will play each note in the list with a call to sleep 1
after each call to play
. We can use another function play_pattern_timed
to specify our own timings and speed things up:
play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m7), 0.25
We can even pass a list of times which it will treat as a circle of times:
play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m13), [0.25, 0.5]
This is the equivalent to:
play 52, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play 55, sustain: 0.5
sleep 0.5
play 59, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play 62, sustain: 0.5
sleep 0.5
play 66, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
play 69, sustain: 0.5
sleep 0.5
play 73, sustain: 0.25
sleep 0.25
Which would you prefer to write?
Note that play_pattern
and play_pattern_timed
alter the sustain of the notes to fill the times. You can remove this behavior by setting the sustain:
opt to 0
:
play_pattern_timed chord(:E3, :m13), [0.25, 0.5], sustain: 0