Strudel (available at the website strudel.cc) is a browser-based music live-coding environment used by DJs to create ambient electronic sounds at “algoraves”.

The software is built in Javascript, as a port from another “livecoding” environment called tidalcycles. This means it will run entirely in a browser alone. In fact, once the code has been downloaded, it’s not even necessary to maintain an internet connection.

While it is very flexible and there are countless functions and emulated instruments to allow you to create and manipulate soundscapes, it’s designed to create and run regular repeating patterns more than a music track with a beginning, middle and end.

There is lots of documentation, however it’s not always obvious how to do some very basic things like play several instruments at the same time and sequence patterns. The video outlines how to do this through the example of trying to “cover” of Tyler The Creator’s “I’ll Take Care Of You” from scratch.

While there are several free DAWs (digital audio workstations), they typically require downloading an app and/or use of a desktop browser. Strudel runs in a mobile phone Chrome browser and combines authentic sounding instruments with an efficient music coding language to democratise music making.

I found out about Strudel only very recently and was blown away by the idea of it – that one can quickly create pro-sounding drum machine, synth and sample patterns with just a few lines of code running in a browser on any device – even a mobile phone with a browser.

I was aware of some free apps for making music like BandLab, and of course trackers have been around for decades but the potential power of this relatively new technology to allow anyone to create cool sounding music without much academic understanding of music theory or having spent days and years learning an instrument seemed to open up music making.

Strudel is great for serendipitously discovering pleasing patterns and loops and easily copy/pasting musical fragments and ideas but I struggled to work out how to create a regular linear piece of music with parts that play in parallel and sequence, even with the shedload of documentation and examples and videos.

By studying the various sources including Reddit forums and the various Strudel code covers people have shared I gradually worked out how to use Strudel more like a DAW for creating a piece of music rather than just a tool to play patterns for inclusion in a DJ set.

To both help me learn and share the knowledge I created this ‘cover’ video (it’s not a full cover!) that walks through some of the most important Strudel elements, concepts and techniques necessary to get going with Strudel as a music composition tool (rather than just an adjunct to other gear).

I hope people, and newbies in particular, find it a useful quick intro to Strudel.
The biggest shortcoming/difficulty I found was finding/creating sounds similar enough to those I heard in pieces of music I enjoyed which can give ‘covers’ a very amateur and childish feel.

I guess Strudel will never compete with a real DAW in that way but still think it’s an amazing and inspiring technology that could maybe help people better understand music (e.g. it helped me understand how some catchy drum patterns work where even in basic 4/4 notes can be longer than a quaver but shorter than a crotchet).

Hope it helps some on their Strudel/musical journey 😃