Very Sus chords in Sonic Pi

Bottom line: Use Suspended chords (aka sus) like Sus2 and Sus4 to add a bit of tension before releasing to a major or minor chord.

So you've got a number of ways to play chords in Sonic Pi. You could use any of the following (I'm adding the sleeps in there so you can copy/paste into your Sonic Pi window)

play_chord([60,62,67]) # provide the number which correspond notes (where middle C == 60)

sleep 1

play chord(:C3, :major) # provide chord name

sleep 1

play_chord([:C, :D, :G]) # provide the names of the notes you want to use 

sleep 1 

play 60 # play the notes individually without sleeps between them
play 62
play 67

For the purposes of the rest of this post, I'll use the second form cause it's compact and we can see the numbers.

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Now, we've got major chords, and the music theory the notation is 1-3-5 (ie Base Note + 3 + 5).
Similarly, we've got minor chords with the notations 1-2-5.

In Sonic Pi lingo, if you wanted C Major, using our Number notation it would be 

play_chord([60,64,67])

This was a little confusing for me at first, though, because we have a base note 60 and that corresponds to 1 (in the music theory notation). By that logic, wouldn't the next note be 63? Nope. 1-3-5 refer to whole notes. Sonic Pi, however, puts the sharps/flats alongside the whole notes. It's a little more complex than that and warrants a separate post so, for our purposes here, if we want to manually construct the chords, we have to keep in mind the sharps and flats. 

Really, it's a heck of a lot easier to just use the built-in chord function so you don't have to keep track of the individual numbers:

play chord(:C3, :major)

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Now that we have chords established, the chords in question today are Suspended. The ones I've been playing with are Sus2 (1-2-5) and Sus4 (1-4-5)

use_synth :piano
play_chord([60,65,67]) #sus4 
sleep 1
play_chord([60,65]) #sus4
sleep 1
play_chord([60,65,67]) #sus4 
sleep 0.25
play_chord([60,62]) #sus2
sleep 0.25
play_chord([60,62,67]) #sus2
sleep 0.25
play_chord([60,64,67]) #major


A couple things to note here. You don't have to stick with a single sus chord, you can mix it up a bit; while they sound different, both carry the tension that will eventually be released. Consider, though, the difference between sus2 and sus4. Sus4 sounds brighter and lighter to me. 

The differences become more apparent if you drop the 5 from the chord so it's just 1-2 and 1-4:

play_chord([60,65]) #sus4
sleep 0.5
play_chord([60,62]) #sus2

Ultimately, though the sus chords' effect comes into play when you contrast it with a major or a minor chord as we did above. 

Oh, one last note, there are a number of other suspended chords, not just sus2 and sus4. I wanted to focus on the concept of the suspended chords.

Let me know in the comments what you think of the different chord notations in Sonic Pi; do you have a preferred method? Do you have any favorite uses of sus chords?

Thanks for reading!

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