NESS Guitar Score Tutorial 1
Plucking strings
This tutorial looks at:
- how to set score and instrument objects
- how to add basic pluck instructions to the score
- how to write the score and instrument objects to NESS-compatible files (.m)
Audio example of this code: score_tut_1.mp3
The code for this tutorial can be found in the gtr_score_1_basic_plucks.py file. For help on running the code see the main repository page.
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First things first
The first step in working with the NESS tools is to import then into the Python script as shown below.
from nesstools import guitar
We will show how this is used in creating the score and instrument objects below. Before we do that though, we will set up two key variables that relate to our score and instrument, the number of strings the instrument will have, and the duration of the score.
stringCount = 2 # number of strings on the instrument
T = 5 # total time
Creating a Score object
We can now use the imported nesstools library to create a new GuitarScore object for an instrument with a given number of strings and a fixed duration:
my_score = guitar.GuitarScore(T, stringCount) # creates a score file using the imported lib and the two variables defined above
You can see how the time variable, T, and the number of strings variable, stringCount, are used in the definition of the GuitarScore object.
Adding events to the score
Let’s pluck each of our two strings.
my_score.pluck( 1, 0.5 ) # pluck string 1 (thickest string by default), at 0.5 seconds
my_score.pluck( 2, 1.0 ) # pluck string 2 at 1.5 seconds
We called our GuitarScore object my_score, so we can use the pluck() function by calling my_score.pluck( string_num, time ) as shown above.
Writing our score file for the NESS system
We now have a complete (if simple) score. We can output this as a NESS-compatible score file by using my_score.write() and specifying a file name inside the brackets.
my_score.write("ness_files_to_process/example1_basic_score.m")
Note that the filename is a string, so must be enclosed within quotes. In this example, we write our score file into the “ness_files_to_process” folder with the filename “example1_basic_score.m”. The score is ready to process, but first we’ll need a corresponding instrument file.
Creating an Instrument object
Defining an instrument is a similar process:
my_guitar = guitar.StringInstrument(stringCount)
We call our StringInstrument object my_guitar and tell it how many strings it has using the stringCount variable (2). For this tutorial, we will just use the default guitar instrument (a steel string-like instrument). Since we have two strings, this will default to the low E string and A string.
my_guitar.defaultGuitar() # set the strings to those of the default guitar prototype
Writing our instrument file for the NESS system
As with the score, the instrument can be written with the write() function:
my_guitar.write("ness_files_to_process/example1_basic_guitar.m")
This writes the instrument file to a .m file for use with the ness system, as described on the main page.
That should be all you need to create a very simple audio file through the NESS System.