maxBreakwell.com

All of my pre­vi­ous projects have come to a dra­matic halt these days while I spend more time edu­cat­ing myself with some real pro­gram­ming skills.

Not hav­ing a lot to show for the past cou­ple months, I thought I’d sim­ply share my opin­ions on some of what I believe are the best book/tutorials avail­able for those look­ing to dive head­first into com­puter pro­gram­ming, cre­ative code, and/or inter­ac­tive media installations.

First off, the book that is essen­tially respon­si­ble for allow­ing me to think that I have any busi­ness what­so­ever writ­ing any kind of code:

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Tags: Interactivity, iphone, jitter, Max/Msp, oF, Open Frameworks, Processing, processing.org, Pure Data, SuperCollider, tutorials

…to any­one who vis­ited my site over the past cou­ple weeks. I was hacked and I wasn’t able to get around to fix­ing the sit­u­a­tion and set­ting up a new site until yesterday.

Everything should be fine now as far as I can tell. Google has taken down their mal­ware warn­ing on my site too. Things have been extra­or­di­nar­ily busy in my per­sonal life recently, but you can expect some new posts and projects to be com­ing out over the next cou­ple weeks.

Please Stay Tuned,

Max

After too long a delay I finally fin­ished my first ver­sion of a TouchOSC based trans­port for Ardour. One of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of this project was the sheer num­ber of Ardour’s func­tions that can be con­trolled via OSC. Deciding what to incor­po­rate into the lay­out and what to leave out took hours of con­sid­er­a­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion. I tried to keep every­thing as stream­lined as pos­si­ble only using using func­tions in my lay­out that I thought would be of the most use.

As I dis­cussed in my pre­vi­ous post, you will need to run Max5 patch in the back­ground to allow bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion between TouchOSC and Ardour. Please go ahead and down­load the .zip file which con­tains the TouchOSC lay­out, .max­pat file, and a .mxf file as well.  Even if you don’t own Max/Msp/Jitter, the patch should work fine using the Max/Msp run­time ver­sion, which is free to download.

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Tags: ardour, cycling 74, daw, digital media, free, jack os, linux, mac, Max/Msp, max5, Music, open source, osc, Software, TouchOSC, transport

FYI

In the process of updat­ing some things on my site today I unknow­ingly erased the down­loads data­base. It’s prob­a­bly going to take me sev­eral hours to maybe a day before every­thing is re-uploaded and work­ing prop­erly. I apol­o­gize to any­one who is try­ing to down­load something.

Come back real soon and I should have things all sorted out.

Thanks,

Max



It’s a shame when life gets in the way of your blog­ging. This has been the case with me ever since the hol­i­days, but I’ll be back soon with some projects and inter­est­ing ideas to share.

In the mean­time, I highly rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to 23 Standards by Anthony Braxton. The entire album is amaz­ing, but as a gui­tarist I was imme­di­ately impressed with the per­for­mance of Kevin O’Neil. His sense of tim­ing and phras­ing is com­pletely orig­i­nal, entirely dif­fer­ent from the funk sen­si­bil­i­ties of my old favorites such as Grant Green or Melvin Sparks. Rather than con­strain­ing his impro­vi­sa­tions to the “in the pocket” feel that most gui­tar play­ers stick to, he man­ages to push, pull, and destroy the groove more like an avant-guard tenor sax player.

He also shreds with incred­i­ble speed and per­sis­tence through­out the entire range of the gui­tar. I have this image in my mind of him hav­ing to buy a new gui­tar every few years or so after wear­ing down the fret­board on the one he cur­rently owns. It’s prob­a­bly not true, but his play­ing sounds that sick.

Give it a lis­ten until you hear from me next. You won’t be disappointed.

Tags: anthony braxton, Grant Green, guitar, Jazz, kevin o'neil, melvin sparks, standards

Ardour is a very inex­pen­sive open source DAW soft­ware that runs on Mac OS and Linux though the use of the Jack Audio Connections Kit. It is essen­tially free, how­ever a small dona­tion will give Mac users the abil­ity to save AU set­tings with a project. In addi­tion to it being open source, many of its func­tions can also be con­trolled through OSC.

Considering the high price tag on most DAW soft­ware I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of the sta­bil­ity and use­ful­ness of some­thing that was basi­cally being given away for free. No rewire sup­port and its depen­dency on Jack also made me won­der if it was worth the time exploring.

After using Ardour for a few weeks I have to say I was wrong to ever doubt it. I have found it to be a very sta­ble pro­gram that is fully capa­ble for most appli­ca­tions, and the use of Jack to route audio has worked flaw­lessly on my MacBook Pro so far. In fact, being free from the con­straints of what is rewire-able has actu­ally opened up some cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties that I though wouldn’t have been pos­si­ble before. Continue Reading »

A com­bi­na­tion of being on vaca­tion, and hav­ing the graph­ics card in my 15.4″ MacBook PRO Laptop Computer fail shortly after I returned, pro­vided an unin­ten­tional oppor­tu­nity to get to know my iPod Touch a lit­tle better.

Jasuto gave me plenty to keep me busy while my com­puter was at the shop. I really enjoy hav­ing so much mod­u­lar synth power on a hand­held device, and I found it’s usage to be fairly intuitive.

Have a look at some more detailed tuto­ri­als and descrip­tions of Jasuto’s fea­tures at the app’s web­page.

Here are a few exmaples of what I could do with Jasuto after a few days of experimentation.

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Tags: DSP, iphone, ipod touch, jasuto, modular, modular synthesizer, plugin, samples, sound, synthesizer, vst

An assort­ment of ran­dom gui­tar sam­ples, mostly of the funk vari­ety, for use with Beatmaker on your iPhone. I wouldn’t rec­om­mend try­ing to make a song with these sam­ples alone, although some can be used together, most of them are at dif­fer­ent tem­pos, and in dif­fer­ent keys; as well as being mixed differently.

I just wanted to offer up some gui­tar sam­ples to the BeatMaker com­mu­nity. The process actu­ally took much longer than I thought. Honestly, I think some of the sam­ples are a bit rough around the edges, but what­ever, they are free for non-commercial use, so slice’em up and have fun!

Here are a few exam­ples of what you get when you down­load the kit. Also, I have included a small .txt file that gives the bpm for each sam­ple to save you some trouble.

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Tags: BeatMaker, free, funk, funky, guitar, Jazz, Jazzy, Kit, samples

After my pre­vi­ous post, Jitter Kaleidoscope and other Cool Effects, I decided to spend some more time with the Peter Elsea Tutorials and see how else I could mashup my pho­tos. His tuto­ri­als on the [jit.repos] object gave me a lot to work with, and for those who are more math­e­mat­i­cally inclined, I’m sure these sim­ple exam­ples could be taken much further.

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Tags: cycling 74, effect, Japan, jitter, kaleidoscope, Mashups, photography, pixel, trigonometry, tutorial

Recently I sat down to do some­thing I haven’t done in a long time. Make a MixTape for a friend. After hear­ing No Room For Squares by Hank Mobley, my friend admit­ted that she was much more knowl­edge­able on the sub­ject of vocal jazz as opposed to instru­men­tal jazz. So, I offered to make her a MixTape of some songs that she might like.

These are the tracks that I decided on. By no means is this a list of tracks I feel to be the most impor­tant or most influ­en­tial in the jazz genre, but rather a com­pi­la­tion of tracks that I enjoy or find unique for a par­tic­u­lar rea­son. Please feel free to leave com­ments on any of the tracks that I men­tion, or ones that you feel should have been included.

The Real McBop Live at the Blue Note by Arturo Sandoval

• Recorded June 10 – 11, 2004 at the Blue Note, NY
  Arturo Sandoval (Trumpet)
  Dennis Marks (Bass)
  Felipe Lamoglia (Saxophone)
  Rene Toledo (Guitar)
  Tomas Cruz (Percussion)
  Alexis Arce (Drums)
  Phil Magallanes (Piano)

This album includes a DVD of the per­for­mance as well as the CD ver­sion. Well worth the money, espe­cially since halfway through the per­for­mance Arturo plays an imag­i­nary Acoustic Bass and does some extended vocal solos that are bet­ter appre­ci­ated seen than just heard. The DVD also includes some inter­views with Arturo Sandoval as an added bonus. The open­ing track, The Real McBop, is a fast Bebop tune pushed along by Afro-Cuban rhythms. I love this sound, and clearly nobody is doing it bet­ter these days than Arturo Sandoval.

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Tags: album reviews, Alice Coletrane, Arturo Sandoval, Charles Mingus, Elvin Jones, Grant Green, Horace Silver, Irakere, Jazz, jazz music, Joey DeFrancesco, KCSM, Larry Young, MixTape, music reviews, Woody Shaw, yusef lateef

This Beatmaker Kit is my attempt at putting together a Lo-Fi col­lec­tion of junky sound­bits for rough noisy beats.

Most of the sounds I used for this kit are from a col­lec­tion of field record­ings that I did years ago on a hand-held tape recorder. My goal with this col­lec­tion was to cre­ate an appeal­ing Lo-Fi kit from what essen­tially was, just some mod­er­ately inter­est­ing record­ings with low qual­ity sound.

I also added a few home­made sam­ples that I recorded directly into my com­puter as well. Have a lis­ten to what I did with it and down­load the Kit if you like.

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Junky Kit Download Link

Get Beatmaker Here

Tags: agogo, BeatMaker, bell, cuica, guiro, Lo-Fi, percussion, samples, surdo, tamborim, triangle, wooden flute

During what free time I have, I usu­ally devote my energy to music, or all things audi­ble for that mat­ter, but recently I have begun exper­i­ment­ing with cre­at­ing visual effects as well.

Original Image

Kaleidoscope Effect

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Tags: cycling 74, effect, ES-135, fireworks, gibson, guitar, jitter, kaleidoscope, math, mirror, photography, spiral, trigonometry, tutorial, wave

Now that the TouchOSC edi­tor has arrived the first thing I did was sit down and cre­ate a more appro­pri­ate lay­out for the draw­bar con­trol appli­ca­tion I made for my Nord Electro 2.

Download the .max­pat ver­sion here.

or the Runtime ver­sion here.

You can view the orig­i­nal post here if you want.

What’s New?

As you can see in the pic­ture, the lay­out now has 9 faders to match each of the Nord Electro Drawbars. I also inverted the direc­tion of the slid­ers to match the direc­tion of the Drawbar LEDs.

There are two pages, the first page (green) con­trols the upper draw­bars, and the sec­ond page (red) con­trols the lower draw­bars. The cus­tom GUI now makes it less con­fus­ing with no funny workarounds for only hav­ing 8 faders.

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Tags: Drawbars, Max/Msp, MIDI, Nord Electro 2, Nord Electro 3, TouchOSC

After hear­ing some sub­tle yet effec­tive use of the wah-wah pedal on Yusef Lateef’s album, Yusef Lateef’s Detroit Latitude 42º 30º Longitude 83º, I was com­pelled to attempt writ­ing my own “wah” effect patch in Max/MSP.

I’ve been tin­ker­ing with this patch for a few days now, and even though I know it’s surely not per­fect, I think it sounds rea­son­ably cool. Also, I’m tired of mess­ing with it, so I fig­ured I just post it here for any­one inter­ested, or any­one who can pro­vide some advice on how to make it bet­ter. Here is a short sam­ple.

Bear in mind this sam­ple is to dis­play the sound of the effect not my gui­tar play­ing. I didn’t spend much time focussing on “get­ting gui­tar part right” if you know what I mean.

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Tags: cycling 74, DSP, effect, guitar, Max/Msp, wah-wah effect, yusef lateef

After some time of pro­cras­ti­na­tion and a brief period of inspi­ra­tion I finally got around to fur­ther devel­op­ing the project that I started in my pre­vi­ous post on MIDI Generating LFOs. There are two big addi­tions included in the sec­ond ver­sion of this patch. The first is that I bor­rowed some aspects of Gregory Taylor’s excel­lent new tuto­r­ial on the Cycling 74 web­site, and the sec­ond is that I added TouchOSC sup­port to cre­ate cooler ways of con­trol­ling the new para­me­ters. Here is a short exam­ple of what it sounds like through one of my favorite synths.

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Tags: LFO, Max/Msp, MIDI, TouchOSC