Subsequence guide

Every chapter of the Subsequence guide, in reading order, with the first sentence of each.

• Introduction - This guide teaches Subsequence by building one piece of music with it, from a first drum beat to a lead line that follows the weather.
• Install and connect - By the end of this chapter, Subsequence is installed on your computer, it has written a note to a MIDI file, and you have heard that note on an instrument of your own.
• A first beat - By the end of this chapter, the piece has begun: a drum beat with a kick on every beat, a snare on the second and fourth beats, and a closed hi-hat on every sixteenth note.
• Ghost fills - By the end of this chapter, the beat sounds played rather than programmed: quiet snare notes fall around the backbeat, in different places from bar to bar, and in the same places every time the piece is rendered.
• A Euclidean snare - By the end of this chapter, a second snare plays five quiet hits spread as evenly as they will go across every bar, turned so that they pull against the beat.
• Swing, groove and other transforms - By the end of this chapter, the whole kit swings, the closed hi-hats rise and fall in loudness across the bar instead of playing at one velocity, and you know how to reshape any pattern after its notes are placed.
• Patterns that change every cycle - By the end of this chapter, every fourth bar ends in a tom fill, and a pedal hi-hat every three sixteenth notes turns against the beat, and starts a bar with it again only every third bar.
• An arpeggiated bass line - By the end of this chapter, a bass line climbs through the notes of E minor in sixteenth notes, landing on its root with the kick on every beat and swinging with the kit.
• Chords that move - By the end of this chapter, a pad plays a chord progression that Subsequence chooses as the piece goes, a chord a bar, and the bass line plays the notes of whichever chord is sounding.
• A melody that remembers - By the end of this chapter, a melody moves over the chords in eighth notes, leaping and then turning back, stepping and then carrying on, as a singer's line does, with a breath here and there.
• Motifs and phrases - By the end of this chapter, a hook you wrote, eight notes long, plays above the melody as a question and its answer: once ending open, on the fifth note of the scale, then again ending at home, on the first.
• Sections and form - By the end of this chapter, the piece has a shape: a four-bar intro of pad and hi-hats, a build where the kit, bass and melody come in, a drop with everything, and a breakdown that pulls back, with the drums falling out for the bar before the drop and a tom fill at the end of each section.
• Shaping over time - By the end of this chapter, the pad swells from quiet to full across the build, the closed hi-hats breathe in and out every four bars, and the tempo rises through the build into the drop and settles back in the breakdown.
• Patterns that listen to each other - By the end of this chapter, the drums measure how syncopated each bar of theirs is, and the bass listens: when the drums are busy on the weak sixteenth notes, it plays one long root note a beat and leaves them room, and when they are plain, it plays its full arpeggio.
• Controllers, bends and slides - By the end of this chapter, the pad's filter opens across the build, from dark to bright, and the bass slides up into its top note, in the manner of an acid bass line.
• A lead driven by the weather - By the end of this chapter, a lead plays in the drop that follows a day of London weather: it climbs as the temperature rises and brightens as the wind picks up, moving smoothly from one reading to the next.
• Microtonal tuning, a study - By the end of this chapter, a lead and a pad play in nineteen-tone equal temperament, with nineteen equal steps to the octave instead of twelve, and then in just intonation read from a Scala file.
• Performing the piece - By the end of this chapter, the piece plays live under your hands: the hats drop out and come back, a tom fill fires from a key, the drop comes when you choose, and the second snare thickens while it plays.
• Live coding - By the end of this chapter, the piece plays while you edit its patterns, and every save is heard from the next bar without the music stopping.
• Playing with other gear - By the end of this chapter, the piece keeps time with other gear and apps, takes a knob and a held chord from a keyboard, plays its bass on two instruments at once, and names its sounds in a file it shares with Subsample.
• Capturing a take - By the end of this chapter, the piece is a MIDI file to open in a DAW: a take rendered with a new melody and steady drums, and a way to record a take as you play it live.