Shorthand

Zen is designed to be quick to write and clear to read. Most methods and parameter names have a corresponding alias to enable brief typing. There's also some syntactic sugar so that you don't need to type out s0 every time you want to access a property on a stream.

Here’s a quick example, followed by the same code written in shorthand:

s0.set({inst:0,cut:0,mods:0.1,reverb:0.5})
s0.p.n.saw(0,32,2).add(48)
s0.p.modi.sine(0,4,0,0.5)
s0.p.harm.tri(1,2)
s0.p.pan.noise()
s0.e.set(1)

s0.v({in:0,cu:0,ms:.1,re:.5})
  .p.n.sa(0,32,2).a(48)._
  .p.mi.si(0,4,0,.5)._
  .p.ha.tr(1,2)._
  .p.pa.no()._
  .e.v(1)

A list of aliases can be found in the docs.

Syntactic sugar

There are a few other ways to write Zen code that are not strictly aliases, but are designed to make code more concise and readable.

Wherever you use the .set() method, you can use just () instead. For example, these two lines are equivalent:

s0.set({inst:0,cut:0,mods:0.1,reverb:0.5})
s0({inst:0,cut:0,mods:0.1,reverb:0.5})

Here's another example:

s0.p.n.set(60)
s0.p.n(60)