Tidal club course

It’s not all about actual tides..

I’ve started a “Learning TidalCycles” course with support of Lucy Cheesman (aka Heavy Lifting) and other friends (newcomers – see below for video explaining what live coding and TidalCycles is). We called it “Tidal Club” after some peer learning events Lucy started in Sheffield. The course is now in the fourth week of the first group of lessons. In an effort to keep the course accessible as possible, there’s absolutely no time limit on getting through the material, which is oriented around pre-recorded video and worksheets. (more thoughts about making online courses accessible here..)

So registrations are still open, and you can join the course it at any time, (although I might have to pause signups from time to time so we don’t get overrun with new learners). Interaction is based around the Tidal Club forum, for which we’ve got a code of conduct, and Lucy has been developing guidelines for giving each other constructive feedback on our work too.

The course is “pay as you feel” via this shop, with the following guide for the first four-week block:

  • £0 – for those who wouldn’t be able to participate otherwise
  • £12 (£3 per week) – standard
  • £24 (£6 per week) – those with extra cash to spare
  • £40+ (£10 per week) – those with institutional backing

Here’s the video lessons covered so far, at the time of writing (6th May 2020):

  • Intro
    • Installation
    • Technical tour of a Tidal system
  • Week 1 – mini-notation week!
    • Tidal Interaction
    • Loading sample packs
    • Sequencing with mini-notation (parts one, two and three)
  • Week 2
    • Starting out with effects
    • Manipulating time with setcps, cps patterns and fast/slow functions
    • Combining patterns with arithmetic (plus the ‘hurry’ function)
  • Week 3
    • Exploring the ‘every’ function, including tackling that ‘$’
    • ‘cut’ vs ‘legato’
    • ‘slice’ and ‘splice’
    • ‘chop’ and ‘striate’
  • Week 4 (this week)
    • Continuous ‘waveform’ patterns – sine, square, tri, saw and random functions (with a bit on binary patterns)
    • More still to come – all the random functions, including shuffle, sometimes and someCycles
  • Plus!
    • Challenges! (so far, exploring big tempo changes, and making music from speech)
    • Live streams (at different times to reach different timezones, and archived for later viewing)
    • A performance talk-through with Antonio Roberts
    • + more to come, including reference material.

After this four-week block we’ll take a rest, so I can prepare for the next four-week batch of lessons, taking things to the next level.. For which there’ll be another opportunity to pay-as-you-feel!

If you’re unsure what live coding and/or Tidal actually is, then here’s a quick video intro about that (and the also awesome Gibber and Hydra live coding environments), which I did for the creative guild in Sheffield:

If this sounds good to you, sign up over here!

(If you don’t want to join the course, but want to join the Tidal Club forum, you can register here.)

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