There is no topic in here about this yet, so now there is. I just bought a Rasberry Pi 4 in a fit of pique during the Amazon Prime days as it was on sale. I have always wanted one because of the huge variety of things you can do, but I never really dove into the music angle until I had clicked the buy-now button. Lo and behold, there are a shed-load of options for using Pi in your studio, so I thought it was high time to 1. Make a list of such things, and 2. document my journey through the world of Pi in music, and encourage others to jump in with their experiences.
So here is a list I will try to dutifully maintain, of various things you can do with Pi in your studio.
what do you mean with “80s machines?” like the Roland step sequencers?
I have been mostly interested in using mine for a sequencer of sorts…it should have enough power to do all sorts of sequencing things. So far I have seen a few Midi “hats” for the Pi, but also started to look at arduino as a more firmware/analog option. Less software layer, no GUI interface to speak of, just sequencing with knobs and buttons. But then I keep thinking I really want a touchscreen because it is more flexible. Not much of a point here I guess, I just wanted to comment that there are tons of ideas, and even a few solutions available if you google around a bit.
vis-a-vis Midi, you can also just get a USB-Midi adapter, they apparently work well with RPIs.
If you’re interested in live coding, you could try Sonic Pi (you’ll have to google it as I can post URLs) which is based on the SuperCollider engine.
I didn’t realize there was a thread for this already, but after flipping through a copy of MagPi and seeing a Pi 3 project that was essentially a modular guitar pedalboard written completely from scratch in C (I’ll try to screencap that one just to see if it tickles anyone else’s funny parts), I started rethinking my strategy; I’m as lazy as a bag of dicks, and not nearly as talented as most people, but I want to do something fun.
All I’ve got on hand is a Le Potato and a pair of Orange Pis (the poor bastard’s version of Pi 3’s - I think the one Orange Pi cost me about $10 thanks to some holiday sale), and all I really want to do is send MIDI headlessly over to my digital piano. Shouldn’t be too hard, in theory, but I’m thinking of being able to feed it MIDI files on the fly and have it actually play songs in time. You know, for those dinner parties or baby’s naptime – honestly, just having a jukebox-type thing like that sounds like a lot of fun, especially in a world where MIDI files are very abundant. I also can’t play the keys for shit, and having an 88-key sitting here is making me want to actually utilize it somehow.
I guess the hardest part is on the software end; coming up with some kind of timing scheme, getting things to interpret correctly, cuing MIDI files and all of that malarky. Has anyone done anything like this / does anyone have any ideas? One way or another, I really want to make this happen over the next few months. Even if I can just feed it Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb without having to code every note myself, it’ll be worth a million bucks.
Since it’s headless, I’m definitely considering something like ChucK’s CLI as a springboard, but there might be more that I don’t even know about yet.
I just bought a Rasberry Pi 4 in a fit of pique during the Amazon Prime days as it was on sale. I have always wanted one because of the huge variety of things you can do, but I never really dove into the music angle until I had clicked the buy-now button. Lo and behold, there are a shed-load of options for using Pi in your studio, so I thought it was high time to 1. Make a list of such things, and 2. document my journey through the world of Pi in music, and encourage others to jump in with their experiences.