Day 8 - more Max/MSP

So today I found some time in Amsterdam to mess around more with the patching this new piece. Ended up writing several little modules, incrementally building up to the whole patch: although I did end up going down a direction that didn't quite work, it showed me some other possibilities.

One thing I learned today was that sometimes I should not let "vanilla pride" get in the way too much. While it would be great to only code in built-in objects, I've wasted too much time in the past trying to build something that someone else has already found a much better solution for. Today I spent an hour or so messing with a sub-patch that would keep track of how many notes are being sustained on a keyboard, after making a terribly complex patch but buggy patch I decided that it wasn't worth it and found (almost instantly) that Lreg did that job perfectly. I figure this just wasn't the time for me to make that, I'll concentrate on the piece first.

Here's some screenshots of what I did with brief explanations.

"kbd hold pitch" - this started to get messy, trying to keep track of what keys are depressed and released, gave up on this...

...for this, much simpler; Lreg to the rescue.

Then finally to a system that treats the first key depressed as normal pitch, with subsequent keys as transpositions of the file played simultaneously. Releasing all keys resets the system. Also on the left in this image is the sampleplayer.

This was where things went wrong, because of course I don't want it always to be at normal pitch for the initial key depress. so tomorrow I'll make it work at different starting pitches.


Here's all the max patches from today: they're all Max5 patches, and they also need Peter Elsea's Lreg to work.