Concepts

Mini-notation

Strudel/Tidal-style pattern syntax for rapid musical exploration.

Mini-notation is a terse, string-based DSL for describing rhythmic patterns. It comes from the TidalCycles family and is embedded inside Akkado alongside the regular DSP-graph syntax.

The basics

A pattern string is a space-separated list of events that evenly fill one cycle (by default, one bar).

"c4 e4 g4 b4"       // four notes, one per beat
"c4 [e4 g4] b4"     // subdivide: e4+g4 share beat 2
"c4 ~ e4 ~"         // ~ is a rest
"c4*4"              // repeat c4 four times in the slot
"<c4 e4 g4>"        // one note per cycle, rotating

Combining with signals

Patterns in NKIDO are regular signals — you pipe them into oscillators just like you’d pipe a control signal.

note("c4 e4 g4 b4")
  |> osc('saw')
  |> filter('lp', 1200)
  |> out()

The note() builtin turns a pattern string into a frequency signal. When the pattern advances, the oscillator’s frequency updates on the beat — and because of hot-swap, the phase keeps going across pitch changes.

Effects within the pattern

Mini-notation supports a handful of inline effects:

  • x!3 — replicate x three times inline.
  • x@2 — x takes twice as long as the others.
  • x? — play x with 50% probability.
  • [a,b] — play a and b in parallel.

Example: a two-bar riff

note("<c4 eb4> g4 [bb4 c5] a4")
  |> osc('square')
  |> filter('lp', 2000 + envelope(0.2, 0.4) * 3000)
  |> * 0.25
  |> reverb(0.3)
  |> out()

Every slot in the pattern is itself a signal, so you can modulate per-slot parameters — velocity, filter, pan — by writing a parallel pattern and multiplying.

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