strudel-covers

name

strudel-covers

description

The craft of recreating a KNOWN song in Strudel — transcribing a melody you can hum into note patterns, building full-song form with arrange() or a pick() section-selector, the chiptune channel model (square/square/triangle/noise) for NES/8-bit covers, voice labels ($lead/$bass), chord()+voicing() for harmony, scale-index melodies, matching the original's timbre with gm_* voices, and the MIDI→Strudel shortcut. Ships 13 worked example covers curated from awesome-strudel (Super Mario Bros, Undertale "Determination", New Order "Blue Monday", Radiohead "Pyramid Song" + "Everything In Its Right Place", Stranger Things, Pump Up The Jam, Shostakovich Waltz 2…). Use when covering or transcribing an existing song, "make a Strudel version of <song>", "recreate this melody", "write out this tune", "chiptune/8-bit cover", "how do famous tracks get coded", or when learning idioms from real complete Strudel songs.

Recreating a song you already know — a pop hit, a game theme, a melody you can hum — is the fastest way to learn Strudel and a genre of its own (the live-coding scene loves a good cover). This skill is the craft of getting "a song in your head" → working Strudel code, plus a library of 13 real covers to read.

This is transcription + arrangement, distinct from generating something original. For writing fresh melodies see [[strudel-melody]]; for chord theory [[strudel-harmony]]; for song structure/dynamics [[strudel-arrangement]]; for the full method catalog [[strudel-modifiers]].

Capture vs. cover — ask which one the brief is. Often the ask isn't "recreate the whole song" but "I love THIS hook — make it mine." Then full transcription is a trap: a faithful re-voicing (even with warm gm_* instruments instead of the chiptune original) reads as "too alike" — a karaoke of the source, not a creation. The fix is to keep the loved gesture sacred — transcribe that one hook note-for-note (it's usually the simplest, most-sustained phrase; when reading a MIDI, the long/whole-note voice is often the hook, not the busy lead) — and rebuild everything around it as original material in the target voice: fresh groove, bass, counter-melody, instrumentation, tempo/feel. The opposite failure is just as real and worse: reharmonizing or "improving" the hook itself deletes the soul the listener loved (renaming a track after a theme while throwing the theme away). Protect the hook; reinvent the surroundings. Default toward more transformation than feels necessary — "too alike" is the likely miss. (For the original-writing side: [[strudel-compose]] / [[strudel-melody]].)

The example library — read these

skills/skills/strudel-covers/examples/ holds 13 complete, verbatim covers curated via awesome-strudel. They are third-party arrangements kept as learning references (each file carries an attribution header; the verbatim sources are gitignored — see note at bottom). Open them — reading a finished cover teaches more than any prose.

File	Song / composer	Teaches
mario-theme-flowhacker.strudel	Super Mario Bros. (Koji Kondo)	The chiptune channel model — square1/square2/triangle/noise, per-part consts, arrange(), mute flags, .add("24") octave shift, .crush()/.clip()
determination-undertale-claffystic.strudel	UNDERTALE "Determination" (Toby Fox)	Clean melody transcription — $lead/$harmony/$bass labels, multi-bar note(\<…>`)template, chords as[G#5,F5]` stacks
everything-in-its-right-place-codester.strudel	Radiohead	Minimal piano + .fm("<0 1 2 8>") morph + ._punchcard() — a whole cover in 15 lines
blue-monday-lewis.strudel	New Order — Blue Monday	const kick/hats/snare/bass + arrange() with bar counts; gm_synth_bass_1; ._pianoroll()
blue-monday-eefano.strudel	New Order — Blue Monday (terse take)	Scale-index bass lead n(…).scale("d2:minor") — the SAME song in 6 lines
stranger-things-eefano.strudel	Stranger Things (Dixon/Stein)	p1:/p2: labels, supersaw arpeggio, scale() + perlin filter LFO, superimpose detune
happy-birthday-eefano.strudel	Happy Birthday	chord().voicing().anchor(), .rootNotes(2) bass, gm_harmonica, .color()
pyramid-song-radiohead-eefano.strudel	Radiohead — Pyramid Song	Advanced: custom register('split'), pickRestart, chord-symbol map, pickOut drum kit
rhythm-of-the-night-eefano.strudel	Corona — Rhythm of the Night	pick-based section sequencing, chord().voicing() + gm_synth_strings_1, penv
pump-up-the-jam-eefano.strudel	Technotronic	.vowel() formant lead, .as("n:penv"), layer(), TR909 arrange-by-pick drums
shostakovich-waltz-2-eefano.strudel	Shostakovich — Waltz No. 2	3/4 waltz feel, orchestral gm_* voices
old-macdonald-eefano.strudel	Old MacDonald	.add(note("<0!4 1!5…>")) progressive transpose, sample-preload trick

Start with Determination (cleanest transcription) and Mario (cleanest chiptune). The eefano covers reach for custom register() combinators — powerful but read them last.

Move 1 — transcribe a melody into note()

The core skill. A melody is a sequence of pitches and rests in time. Write it as a multi-bar tagged template:

$lead: note(`<
[F#5 F5 D#5 C#5 D#5 A#4 C5 ~]
[G#4 ~  D#5 F5  F#5  ~  G#5 ~]
[C#6 ~  A#5@5 ~]
>`).sound("square")

(from determination-undertale-claffystic.strudel). The grammar that does 90% of the work:

• <a b c> — one item per cycle (here, one bar per cycle).
• [x y z] — subdivide a bar evenly (8 slots above = eighth notes).
• ~ — a rest.
• @n — give an event n units of duration (A#5@5 = hold 5 slots → a long note inside the bar).
• !n — repeat (F5!2 = two F5s; [x ~]!2 = that pair twice).
• [A,B] — a chord: play A and B together ([G#5,F5]). Stack as many as you like.
• *n / /n — speed up / slow down a sub-pattern.

Octaves are the number after the letter (C4 = middle C, C5 an octave up). Don't fight to get octaves perfect by ear — transcribe the shape, then shift whole sections with .add() (Move 5).

Move 2 — voice labels beat const+stack

Two ways to run several voices at once. Labels ($name: at column 0) auto-register into the playing stack — no stack() wrapper, and each line stays editable on its own:

$lead:    note(`<…>`).s("square")
$harmony: note(`<…>`).s("triangle")
$bass:    note(`<…>`).s("square").gain(.3)

Bare name: works too (older covers use p1:, piano:, drums:). The alternative is const lead = …; stack(lead, harmony, bass) — use that when you need to post-process the whole mix (stack(...).room(0.3).cpm(124/4), as the eefano covers do). Both are throughout the examples.

Move 3 — build the whole song (two patterns)

A real cover has sections (intro / verse / chorus / bridge). Two idioms:

arrange([bars, pattern], …) — a timeline. Each pair plays pattern for bars cycles, then moves on. This is how Mario and Blue Monday lay out form:

$: arrange(
  [2, stack(sqr1(intro), sqr2(intro), tri(intro))],   // 2 cycles of intro
  [8, stack(sqr1(partA), sqr2(partA), tri(partA))],   // 8 of part A
  [4, stack(sqr1(partB), sqr2(partB), tri(partB))],   // 4 of part B
)

pick / pickRestart section-selector — a top "score" pattern indexes into an array of sub-patterns; advance the score to change sections (eefano's covers). "<0 1@4 0 1@4 2 3@7>".pick([verse, chorus, bridge, …]). More flexible for songs that re-use sections out of order; arrange() is more readable for straight A-B-C form. See [[strudel-arrangement]] for choosing.

Move 4 — the chiptune channel model (NES/8-bit covers)

The NES had 2 pulse (square) channels + 1 triangle (bass) + 1 noise (percussion). Cover a game theme by mirroring exactly that — it's why mario-theme-flowhacker.strudel sounds right:

// one const per channel, per section
const square1_A = `< … lead voice … >`.add("24")   // melody, shifted +2 oct
const square2_A = `< … harmony a 3rd below … >`.add("24")
const triangle_A = `< … bassline … >`                // triangle = bass

// a helper that gives each channel its fixed timbre
function sqr1Sound(x){ return note(x).s("square").clip(0.7).crush(4).gain(0.3) }
function triangleSound(x){ return note(x).s("triangle").clip(0.7).decay(0.9).crush(8).gain(0.8) }

// noise channel = drums, from white/pink noise + struct
let whitenoise = stack(
  sound("white").struct("- x").fast(2).decay(.02),
  sound("white").struct("- - x -").hpf(400).decay(.12)
)

Key chiptune idioms: .crush(4) (bit-crush → 8-bit grit), .clip() (note length), .add("24") (octave-shift a whole channel — 12 per octave), and mute flags (const muteSquare1 = false; if(muteSquare1) …gain(0)) so you can solo channels while building. Synth-primitive chip sounds and zzfx are catalogued in [[strudel-sample-library]] and [[strudel-sound-design]].

Move 5 — harmony without spelling every note

You rarely need to hand-spell chords. Let Strudel voice them:

const chrds = "F@3 C@6 F@6 Bb@3 F@2 C F@3".slow(8)
chord(chrds).anchor("G4").voicing()                       // auto-voiced chord pad
n("2 ~ ~ 2 1 ~").chord(chrds).anchor(chrds.rootNotes(2))  // bassline from the chord roots
  .voicing().s("gm_electric_bass_finger")

chord() takes symbols (Am, F, Cmaj7), .voicing() realizes them as notes, .anchor("G4") controls register, .rootNotes(2) extracts the bass root at octave 2. setDefaultVoicings('legacy') matches the older covers' voicings. Full theory in [[strudel-harmony]].

Scale-index melodies are the other big shortcut — write step numbers, not note names, and they stay in key:

n("0 2 4 6 7 6 4 2").scale("c3:major")     // Stranger Things arp
n("<[2 3] [3 3]>").scale("d2:minor")        // Blue Monday bass lead

Transpose by adding: .add("12") (up an octave), or progressively over repeats — Old MacDonald climbs with .add(note("<0!4 1!5 2!6 3!7 4!8 ~>")).

Move 6 — match the original's timbre

A cover reads as that song when the voices resemble the record. Reach into the 128 General MIDI voices (see [[strudel-sample-library]] for the full list):

• Synth-pop / electronic → gm_lead_1_square, gm_lead_2_sawtooth, gm_synth_bass_1, supersaw
• Orchestral / classical → gm_string_ensemble_1, gm_synth_strings_1, gm_cello, gm_pizzicato_strings
• Acoustic → piano, gm_harmonica, gm_electric_bass_finger, gm_acoustic_guitar_nylon
• Chiptune → square/triangle + .crush() (don't use gm_* — you want the raw oscillator)

Set tempo to the record's BPM with setcpm(bpm/4) (4 beats per bar) — setcpm(124/4), or setcps(104/60/4) if you think in cps. Match it and the groove locks to the original.

Move 7 — watch what you're playing

While transcribing, a visualizer catches wrong notes instantly. Chain one:

• ._pianoroll() — scrolling note grid; best for checking a melody's contour against your memory.
• ._punchcard() — compact per-cycle grid.
• ._scope() — waveform (Mario uses it per section).
• .color("red") — tag each voice a color so they're distinguishable in any of the above.

The MIDI shortcut — don't hand-transcribe what you can convert

If a MIDI file of the song exists (most game/classical/pop tunes have one online), convert it instead of transcribing by ear:

• MIDI-To-Strudel (Emanuel-de-Jong) — Python or in-browser HTML tool, MIDI → Strudel note() notation. Dumps the literal notes; you then clean up timing, split into voices, and add timbre/effects (the convert gets you the pitches, the craft is everything after).

Workflow: find/export a MIDI → convert → paste into a $lead:/$bass: skeleton → assign gm_* voices → set setcpm → fix octaves with .add() → arrange sections.

Repositories & tools

• eefano/strudel-songs-collection — the deepest public well of clean Strudel covers (Cardiacs, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Coldplay, classical…). Source of 9 of our examples. Read it for sequencing tricks (register(), pick, split).
• MIDI-To-Strudel — MIDI → Strudel converter (above).
• strudel.nvim (gruvw) — drive strudel.cc from Neovim, if you live in vim.
• Our own offline player auto-discovers tracks/<id>/ — to make a cover playable here, drop it in as a track (see [[strudel-conduct]]).

Learn Strudel (tutorials)

For the fundamentals beneath these covers:

• Official Strudel workshop — the canonical getting-started + docs.
• Learning Music Production with Strudel (terryds) — free course for total beginners ("Making Beats" chapter done).
• Coding Music With Strudel — Dan Gorelick & Viola He — comprehensive workshop video.
• Intro To Algorave (Strudel) · Lucy Cheesman — live coding music · Beats, Bytes & Basslines.

Three that got away

awesome-strudel lists three tracks behind the old strudel.cc/?xxxx short-link format, which 404s on the current API and has no clean source — not recovered: Grimes "Music 4 Machines" (KAIXI), Charli XCX "360" (KAIXI), Billie Eilish "Birds of a Feather" (saga_3k). If you want them, open the short links in a browser (the app still resolves them client-side) and paste the code in.

Copyright note

The files in examples/ are verbatim third-party covers of copyrighted compositions; eefano's repo carries no license. They're kept gitignored (local-only, like tracks/*) so this public repo doesn't redistribute them — this SKILL.md teaches the techniques and links to the originals. Un-ignore skills/skills/strudel-covers/examples/ only if you've cleared the rights.

Sources

awesome-strudel · eefano/strudel-songs-collection · MIDI-To-Strudel · Strudel docs · siblings: [[strudel-melody]] [[strudel-harmony]] [[strudel-arrangement]] [[strudel-modifiers]] [[strudel-sample-library]] [[strudel-sound-design]] [[strudel-weird]]