…Lighting a candle

I posted a link to my (well-meaning) gripes about the Csound examples/ subdirectory and got some great responses on the Csound forums (http://www.nabble.com/Csound-f480.html)
If you’re already past the point where you have the basics of Csound running (i.e., you can play an orchestra and score, and/or create a sound file output from them), there are really [...]

Cursing the darkness: complaints/comments/observations on the Csound examples/ folder

Before I start this rant, let me emphasize that I have nothing but gratitude and admiration for all the volunteer programmers and musicians who are responsible for Csound. And that I realize it’s a huge collection of software with pieces up to 20 years old. So even though some of my comments may seem a [...]

Working on Csound/examples and Csound book instruments folders…

When you install Csound, there’s an “examples” folder that gets created. I have to admit that I had a lot of frustration trying to figure out what those files were and how to use them. A few are .csd files that you can just run using the basic Csound5gui or something, but others were more [...]

Playing Csound instruments from a MIDI keyboard (draft version 2)

OK, this mini-tutorial still isn’t “complete,” but I’ll keep improving it little by little and maybe someday I’ll  look at it and be amazed that it’s “done.”
“I don’t want to do any programming AT ALL!”
OK, if you insist…here I’m going to show a couple ways I connected my MIDI keyboard such that I could play a [...]

“But I don’t want to write programs!!”

OK, stop whining, I actually feel your pain.
For most normal musicians, the idea of having to write a computer program in order to create a musical piece is not appealing. Especially in this era of instant gratification. In fact, I can get more gratification using Ableton Live and my big catalog of loops and samples [...]

A little reorganization and…where the *@&$! is the forum???

OK, I figured out how to make a hierarchy of permanent pages. Check out the panel on the right which will show what I’ve written so far about first steps in Csound. I’ve also started adding links to other blogs and websites that are probably better than this one.
One thing I’d like to share with [...]

Here we go…

Csound is a software system for audio and music creation that has roots that go back at least 20 years. It consists of literally thousands of components, utilities, front-ends, compilers, documents and examples.
But due to its great age, largely academic provenance, and free/volunteer nature of the code, it can be extremely daunting to get into. [...]