SuperCollider: UGens, SynthDefs and synthesis

This module is where SuperCollider stops being a calculator that beeps and becomes an instrument you can gig with. The whole task is the anatomy of every serious SC rig — a techno bassline synth feeding a shared reverb, a drone set held open by a gate, an ambient pad retuned mid-piece — all of it reduces to one skeleton: a voice defined once as a SynthDef, spawned as nodes, wired through effect buses in the right order, and steered live. Get this skeleton wrong and you get the classic on-stage failures: silence because the effect reads its bus before the source writes, or a server choking on zombie nodes an hour into a set.

The arc starts supported: nest a couple of oscillators into a filter, hearing how “SuperCollider sounds are built from networks of Unit Generators wired by nesting” makes code mirror signal flow, and use the rate and polarity atoms plus “.range” rescaling as JIT references when a modulator misbehaves. Then freeze a working graph into a named recipe (“SynthDef names and stores a reusable synth recipe”), swap the fixed amplitude for an ADSR whose gate you open and close by hand, and add doneAction: 2 so notes clean up after themselves. The last supported step splits voice from effect across an audio bus, leaning on the node-ordering principle to place the effect after its source. The capstone then asks you to assemble the whole chain unaided.

Required atoms are exactly the gates: graph-building, envelope/gate lifecycle, subtractive and FM voicing, bus routing and execution order. Supporting atoms widen the palette afterward — multichannel expansion and alternate range-scaling approaches for more complex rigs, Groups and SynthDef conventions for bigger rigs, panning and Lag for polish, sample playback, additive and physical-modelling voices, and live input.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

drone

osc 55 >> audio

_{punctual-0001 · CC0-1.0}

SinOsc s => dac;

_{chuck-0001 · MIT}

lowpass-sweep

Noise n => LPF f => dac; 0.2 => n.gain;

_{chuck-0003 · MIT}

s("hh*8").lpf(sine.range(200,4000).slow(4))

_{strudel-0015 · CC0}

adsr-envelope

note("c3").s("sawtooth").attack(0.01).decay(0.1).sustain(0.6).release(0.3)

_{strudel-0205 · CC0}

{ Saw.ar(220) * EnvGen.kr(Env.perc(0.001, 0.2), Impulse.kr(2)) * 0.3 }.play

_{supercollider-0013 · CC0}

fm-timbre

note("c3").s("sine").fm(4).fmh(2).fmi(3)

_{strudel-0204 · CC0}

osc (midicps 24 * (1 ~~ 4 $ osc 110)) >> audio

_{punctual-0006 · CC0-1.0}

modulated-range

s("hh*8").pan(sine.range(0,1).slow(2))

_{strudel-0037 · CC0}

zoom (1 ~~ 2 $ osc 0.25) (circle 0 0.3) >> add

_{punctual-0022 · CC0-1.0}

ring-modulation

osc 440 * osc 220 >> audio

_{punctual-0004 · CC0-1.0}

{ (SinOsc.ar(440) * SinOsc.ar(221)) * 0.2 }.play

_{supercollider-0004 · CC0}

stereo-panning

d1 $ pan (slow 2 sine) # sound "hh*8"

_{tidal-0037 · CC0}

SinOsc s => Pan2 p => dac; -0.7 => p.pan;

_{chuck-0042 · MIT}

additive-synthesis

{ Klang.ar(`[[100, 200, 300, 400], [0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1]]) * 0.1 }.play

_{supercollider-0022 · CC0}

generative-mutation

use_synth :prophet; play (scale :e3, :minor).choose + [0, 12].choose; sleep (ring 0.5, 0.25).choose

_{sonicpi-0045 · CC0}

physical-modeling

Mandolin m => dac; 0.9 => m.pluck; 220 => m.freq;

_{chuck-0043 · MIT}