Building a Strudel.cc workshop

Draft: updating notes as I go along, last updated 13 sep 2026

I’ve been asked to take a strudel.cc workshop on the 27th of this month at the second livecode.blr Subroutine Sessions, which is like a live code performance event. I was a little unsure since I mostly consider myself still an amateur/novice with strudel, and because there might be better people equipped to do this.

But it also could be fun and maybe I’d learn more about strudel in the process. I also enjoy teaching/facilitating and this might be a nice place to get out of my comfort zone.

My friend Azan has also been taking strudel workshops for a while now, so I asked him if we could do it together. He is a software engineer by profession, and also understands music theory a lot better than I do. Not that either of these things are pre-requisites to use strudel and that is the fun part, I think. Perhaps two varying perspectives might be useful for a beginner workshop, where the crowd might also be more divided between programmers/non-programmers.

To get some practice, I’ve asked a bunch of friends if they could do a demo workshop with me so I can figure a workshop flow and get some feedback. It’s a group of visual artists/VJs/motion designers/creative technologists, etc. who do use and understand software/creative tools, so I feel like I might be able to take it a slight step above beginner, beginner, but we shall see.

I’ve structured it like this so far:

5-10~ mins: Quick intro to strudel.cc, tidalcycles, live coding context, beginner-friendliness etc 10~ mins: Intro to the Strudel REPL, basic shortcuts, getting around, and then playing/editing one pattern so that everyone has written /something/, made a sound, and is comfortable with playing/stopping patterns 5~ mins: quick overview of examples/what people do with strudel, the docs 20~ mins: code-along, where I go through making beats, melodies, using effects, samples etc. Pause after every section for people to try out what we’ve just learned and build a small track with a few samples they’ve written. 15~ mins: give people a bit of time to write a simple track/pattern with what they’ve learned

And then everyone plays what they made.

Total: an hour-ish, excluding people playing their tracks. but i have a feeling it might stretch to 1.5 hours.

I’ve put down the workshop flow in a strudel file here. And will ask participants to open up a new tab to write down their own patterns. There is also a document with handy links to examples, etc.

Let’s see how it goes. Will update with feedback.