Sonic Pi is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for writing music in Ruby. I write code with Ruby using the Sonic Pi IDE and sample myself screaming over it with Audacity under the artist name Messica Arson. The sound I create is very much inspired by the strange sounds of noise music combined with my screams I perfected while fronting a punk band.

In this tutorial we’ll walk through how to create this song together.

What is Sonic Pi?

With Sonic Pi we can interact with our computer as if we were using a synthesizer. Under the hood Sonic Pi is a Ruby wrapper for SuperCollider. There are samples and synthesizers loaded in that you can interact with in countless ways. You can also add your own samples as we will be doing in this tutorial.

Download Sonic Pi before moving on with the rest of the post. If you have an older version of Sonic Pi be sure to update to the most recent version (version 3.1). To update, go to the help menu and then click where it says updates and click check now to see if there any recent updates.



Loops are the core of Sonic Pi

Since electronic music is built off repetitive loops, understanding how loops are created is a critical concept to using Sonic Pi effectively. Live loops allow you to make changes on the fly.

The basic syntax of a loop in Sonic Pi is as follows: