What Sialk Stage is
And what it is not, which is the faster half of the answer.
Documentation · 24 pages · five sections
Learn it tonight.
Four short pages take you from nothing to a visual on a second screen, moving with the room. Everything else is here for the night you want it.
Today Sialk Stage plays GLSL shaders, p5 sketches, Three.js scenes and video clips as layers you mix live; when a new kind lands, it says so plainly rather than loading it and hoping.
Start here · four pagesAbout ten minutes · nothing to write
Start here
From nothing to a visual on screen, moving with the music. About ten minutes, and nothing to write.
Install and first run
Download, open it past macOS, and know what you are looking at.
Your first visual on screen
Add a layer, mix it, put it on a second screen.
Play music into it
Sialk Stage listens to an input device. Here is how to give it one.
2 pages
How it works
Three ideas. Everything else in these pages is a detail of one of them.
- Layers, parameters, modulationThe whole model, in about a page.
- What Sialk Stage playsGLSL, p5 and Three.js today, by name, and what happens to everything else.
8 pages
Playing it
The surface, control by control.
- LayersAdding, mixing, ordering, removing.
- ParametersThe four every layer gets, and the ones your sketch declares.
- ModulationBase, reach, and the things that push a value around.
- The audioWhat Sialk Stage hears and what it works out from it.
- Connect a DAWThe Sialk: Connect plugin, stems, the master, and your project’s exact tempo. Arrives with v1.
- The output and fullscreenThe window is the output, not a preview of it.
- Perform and BuildThe same controls, arranged two ways.
- Saving a showWhat a .sialk file holds, and what it does not.
7 pages
Writing a sketch
For the people who make the visuals. Sialk runs your code rather than a recording of it, so this is where the instrument gets interesting.
- A GLSL sketchOne folder, one sketch.glsl, no page and no loop.
- A p5 sketchOne sketch.js in global mode. p5 itself is supplied.
- Reading the audiowindow.sialk, the versioned surface your sketch is written against.
- A Three.js sceneOne scene.js that exports a function. three itself is supplied.
- Declaring parametersHand the performer a fader, a switch, a colour or a trigger.
- Your own control panellil-gui and dat.GUI, kept off the wall and put on the surface.
- Writing a sketch with AIPaste the contract into the assistant you already use, and drag the result on.
3 pages
Reference
Tables to come back to.
- Keyboard referenceEvery key, and where they work.
- What is in the betaHonestly, and with the release each missing piece arrives in.
- When something goes wrongThe log, the messages along the bottom, and how to report it.
If it is not here
Ask on the feedback page. A question that arrives twice becomes a page; the documentation is short on purpose.