One of the things that I’m trying to work out in Strudel are ways to build movement and complexity in rhythm in a live setting. One of the interesting and difficult things to negotiate when working live is that once a rhythm exists, I sometimes find it hard to “hear” variations and kind of get locked in. There are a lot of different rhythmic notations available, and each of them features different tradeoffs between familiarity, ease of expression, and openness to change or alteration. With study, new applications of the notation become clear, and I’d like to compare a few of these devices.

Craving the Grid

If you’re used to using sequencers, it seems like one of the most natural ways to express beats would be using the grid. We love the grid! The grid usually leads us towards the beat function, which is very grid-like and only requires that we take our grid-based thinking into a 0-indexed world. So like, your four on the floor bass drum looks like o---o---o---o--- on a sequencer, and we tend to think of that as a drum on 1, 5, 9, and 13. But we’re programming, so with zero indexing we shift that down to 0,4,8,12. How does that look in strudel?