3 QuickStart Projects

Some people like to read through lengthy textbooks from start to finish before they try out what they’re learning. But they’re probably in the minority. Assuming you’re not one of them, you may want to just roll up your sleeves, start using Csound, and figure out as you go along what additional bits of information you need or want. So in this chapter we’re going to leapfrog straight over the rest of Csound Power! I’ll show you, step by step, how to create a simple musical project. Two of them, in fact. This chapter will be short on explanations of details (that’s what the rest of the book is for) and long on quick results.

By the time you reach the end of this chapter, you’ll have a couple of templates that you can use to start making your own music with Csound. One template will show how to play a sequence of musical notes using a conventional synthesizer; the other will show one way to process recorded audio to make a sound design event. As you expand on the code in the templates, you’ll be learning the details of Csound techniques.

The only assumptions we’ll be making in this chapter are, first, that you’ve downloaded and installed Csound and CsoundQt, as explained in Chapter 2; and second, that you’ve gone through the section “Setting Up Your System” in Chapter 2 and verified that CsoundQt can send audio to your speakers.