For people who fiddle

There is a kind of music person who buys a cheap synth and has replaced its firmware within the month. Lately the firmware is something they wrote over two evenings with a language model’s help, flashed at one in the morning, and fixed at two.

songcode is built for that person.

The habit is older than the tools

Electronic musicians have always opened the box. Korg publishes an SDK so owners of its logue synths can write their own oscillators. Mutable Instruments released the code for its Eurorack modules, and other builders still ship hardware based on it. The norns is a small sound computer whose whole point is running scripts its owners write.

A parallel tradition skipped the hardware and went straight to the code. Live coders have performed for years by typing patterns into a projected editor while a room dances to the result. TidalCycles is the language many of them use, and Strudel is its port to the browser. songcode runs on Strudel.

Both groups share one conviction: an instrument you cannot open is only half yours.

What changed

Writing a wavetable oscillator used to require knowing DSP. Now you can describe one, read what comes back, flash it, hear what is wrong, and say so. The loop is describe, read, run, adjust.

That loop is songcode, pointed at tracks. You describe the track. A model writes it as code. You run it, hear what is wrong, and either say so or reach in and fix the line yourself.

The reading step is what separates this from pressing a button. A generate button that returns a finished recording gives you one move: press it again. Source gives you every move there is.

What you get to play with

A prompt can be as loose as “ambient. slow pads, no drums.” It can also be as specific as you like:

acid. 606 drums kept plain. one sawtooth line with octave jumps,
resonance high, filter opening over 16 bars. nothing else.

Under the prompt sit 30 controls for people who have opinions. Twenty-one drum kits: sixteen sampled machines from the CR-78 to the SP-12, four synthesized kits you can tune hit by hit, and one recorded acoustic kit. Root note and scale. Swing, syncopation, ghost notes. How much the filters move. How hard the sidechain pumps. Bitcrush. Vinyl crackle, if you must.

Then there is the code. Every instrument is one named stem: what plays, then the chain it runs through. How to read a track covers the vocabulary in five minutes.

And if you would sooner grab a fader, the stems view shows the same track as a mixer with a piano roll and a drum grid. Mute, solo, set a level, draw a note, or ask for a new take on one stem while the rest stay put. Note edits are written back into the code, so the text is always the real track. Levels and mutes sit on top as a mix and save with it.

Where it fits next to hardware

songcode does not replace a groovebox. It is a good neighbour to one.

As a pattern source. The kick rhythm, the hat accents and the bassline are all written out. Read them off the screen and program them into whatever is on your desk.

As a sample source. Render a loop to WAV in the browser and load it into a sampler. The stems view exports one WAV per stem, so you can take the bassline and leave the rest. A bass exported alone keeps the pump the kick gives it.

As an arrangement sketch. A full track declares its form on one line, as named sections with bar counts: intro:16 build:8 main:32. Each stem says which sections it plays in. That plan transfers to any sequencer.

As a synthesis lesson. Each sound is a short chain of oscillator, filter, envelope and effects with the numbers showing. Change one and listen.

As a way into Strudel. “Open in strudel” hands the current track to Strudel’s own editor, where the rest of the language is available, MIDI output included.

What it will not do for you

It has no MIDI out of its own, no plugin version and no DAW integration. It writes instrumental music and does not sing. The sound is synths and drum machine samples in a browser, and it sounds like that.

If those are deal breakers, the list of limits will save you some time.

The pitch, for this crowd

You already know that the interesting part of a machine is the part you can change. Most AI music tools were designed around the opposite idea, with a result on one side and the workings sealed on the other.

songcode gives you the workings. The first draft comes from a model. Everything after that is you, a text editor, and a track that does what the code says.