Opinionated Advice for SuperCollider Beginners

Nathan Ho — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 22:15:16 GMT

I’m often asked where to find the best resources for learning SuperCollider. My informed and professional answer, which comes from over a decade of experience with this software as a user, developer, and educator, is as follows:

I’m not really sure?

The landscape of SC learning materials has changed a lot since I started in 2012/13. I’ve heard good things about Eli Fieldsteel’s video tutorials and Bruno Ruviaro’s “A Gentle Introduction” ebook, so I guess check those out. I haven’t perused their tutorials at length, but Eli and Bruno are both seasoned professionals at SC education, so you can’t really go wrong there. Also, I have my own SuperCollider Tips blog post (which I have just updated today), which is not a structured tutorial but addresses common beginner problems. But ultimately, the most efficient learning strategy really depends on what you intend to make, because the applications for SC are so diverse, as are the backgrounds of users coming to SC.

That’s probably not too enlightening. However, I do have a lot of advice for beginning SC users, drawing from my own tortuous path through learning to make electronic music.

What follows are a bunch of guidelines that I recommend beginning SC users follow, or at least consider. A good number of them are specific to my idiosyncratic approach to SC, which I’ve expounded on in my YouTube presence: heavy focus on sound design through synthesis, and only sporadic use of hardware and real-time interaction. Also, although some of my advice may help live coders, I’m pretty uninterested in live coding myself, so I can’t give specific advice there (creative coding I’m all for, but when I share my screen it’s for education, not seamless performance art).

Nathan Ho (Posts about teaching)

Opinionated Advice for SuperCollider Beginners