Hi, and welcome to Tidal!
If you picked d1, d2, d3, d4 just as arbitrary names, that’s fine, but be careful: in Tidal, d1…d12 are not patterns, they’re output channels (connections to SuperDirt). d1 $ s "bd sn" means “play this pattern on channel 1”. That’s why you can’t use d1 as a value inside another pattern, and why cat "[d1, d2], ..." won’t work (also, cat takes a list of patterns, not a mini-notation string).
If you meant them as names for your building blocks, define them as normal Haskell variables with other names:
let a = s "bd*4"
b = s "~ sn"
c = s "hh*8"
d = n "0 3 5 7" # s "superpiano"
For the kind of “score” you’re describing, there’s a function made for exactly this: ur (short for “pattern of patterns”). It takes the length in cycles of the whole piece, a mini-notation string that arranges names over time, and a list pairing each name with a pattern:
d1 $ ur 5 "[a,b] [c,d] [b,c] a [a,b,d]"
[ ("a", a)
, ("b", b)
, ("c", c)
, ("d", d)
]
[]
Here:
5 is the total length in cycles, so each of the 5 steps lasts one cycle.[a,b] plays patterns at the same time, like the columns in your diagram.~ gives you a silence, so a ~ ~ a a works for your sparse rows.- The last empty list
[] is for named transformations (functions applied to patterns), which is handy when you want variations of the same material.
Your table reads column by column as "[a,b] [c,d] [b,c] a [a,b,d]", which is exactly what’s above.
If you’d rather keep each row as its own channel, plain cat with silence also works:
d1 $ cat [a, silence, silence, a, a]
d2 $ cat [b, silence, b, silence, b]
but for composing a longer structure from named blocks, ur is usually the nicest fit. You can check its page in the docs under “Composition”.
Hope this helps, and have fun!
