Max/MSP and similar digital processing?

Gear Acquisition Syndrome: A tendency to purchase more equipment than justified by usage and/or price.

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The Mysterious Creep
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Re: Max/MSP and similar digital processing?

Post by The Mysterious Creep »

I finally took the plunge and downloaded VCV Rack, using the Audio-8 device to interface my guitar with it. It's already been quite fun. I don't have nearly the experience yet to use it for a live performance, but the ability to do modular shenanigans with digital equipment that would be ludicrously expensive with pedals already seems worth the time. A midi controller is a must, though, it's hard to rapidly adjust parameters such as filter cutoffs and resonance with a mouse. As someone who's gotten really into gnarled wah sweeps on noisy signals, that's not ideal. Getting a clear guitar signal through has also been challenging, since eurorack signal levels even digitally are much higher than instrument level and VCV's library doesn't really feature any sort of preamp like the Mikrophonie Music Thing. But there's clearly a lot of potential. It's not as intense as the programming and effect construction available in Max/MSP, but there's still a lot to learn. Complex 20+ module patches of the kind most EAI types use would absolutely reduce my shitty 5 year old laptop to a puddle of molten metal, but the availability of synth sounds and complex effects opens up a bunch of options even with limited patch size.
Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you'd still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day. - David Fair
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aberrantrecordings
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Re: Max/MSP and similar digital processing?

Post by aberrantrecordings »

I've been using Max/MSP for years and it can indeed get just as brutal as any pedal. I use pedals, Euro and Max to varying degrees for comparison it's just like anything else you gotta know what you're doing.

One drawback is digital is not quite as good with distortion but using frequency modulation with feedback is really key for noise brutality with Max. Also filtering and then using tanh~ in max for distortion although nothing beats a death metal pedal or similar for that last part.

Also Gen~ in Max really helps with the feedback stuff since you can get down to one or two samples for delay...
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Re: Max/MSP and similar digital processing?

Post by BPJ »

I've used Puredata for years now for generative stuff, autonoise, which is a style I invented the name of right now, and stuff. I really like it, random patching stuff is a lot of fun. On an external somewhere I still have a couple of autonoise patches I made, but mostly I make a patch, record it, and never save.

I used Audiomulch for a long time before that, and I like it a lot, but ran into limitations on what I wanted to do fairly quickly, but it's great for making breakcore very simply. If you want a hand with PD, I don't mind helping during my limited downtime.
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Re: Max/MSP and similar digital processing?

Post by NoiseWiki »

I've been tempted to dink around with Csound again or pickup where I left off with using python to process audio files that have been converted to text. although if I get back into with python I probably won't do that and use actual audio function to mess with shit
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