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

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

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. (more…)

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

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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Tags: LFO, Max/Msp, MIDI, TouchOSC

This is an early rough draft of a com­po­si­tion I started work­ing on recently. It uti­lizes the Max/Msp patch that I wrote about in my first post on Midi Generating LFOs. At the end of that ear­lier post I listed four things that I wanted to work on for the next step in this project. I haven’t done any of it. Except to sync up the LFOs in my patch to a musi­cal com­po­si­tion. So far the piece has an elec­tronic drum track, key­board, and the Max/Msp patch — as well as a hand­ful of other effects. Hope you like it!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Tags: composition, delay, keyboard, LFO, MIDI, Music, reverb, synthesizer

A few weeks ago, I finally got around to thor­oughly read­ing a very dense tuto­r­ial on the Max/Msp web­site about using LFOs as semi–Random num­ber gen­er­a­tors. I’m always look­ing for newer and hip­per ways of adding an amount of ran­dom­ness to com­puter music — so why not use MIDI gen­er­at­ing LFOs?

The tuto­r­ial by Greg Taylor starts here, and in its three parts con­tains a wealth of know-how on MAX.

I agree with his state­ment that,

Max is really just about mes­sages, num­bers, and lists and how you move them about;

As a new­comer to Max/Msp this arti­cle answered many of my ques­tions. It also did a good job of plug­ging some of the advan­tages of MAX 5 at the same time. Specifically, the abil­ity to link dif­fer­ent ele­ments to MAX’s global trans­port, and the new pre­sen­ta­tion view, which although it is cool, I usu­ally put off spend­ing time on.

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Tags: LFO, Max/Msp, MIDI

This Post has been updated. Please click *HERE* to view the new post

Many peo­ple have writ­ten about how awe­some the TouchOSC appli­ca­tion is for iPhone/iPod Touch, and I also agree. I’ve been hav­ing tons of fun with it on my iPod in com­bi­na­tion with Max/Msp cre­at­ing lit­tle cus­tom con­trol apps for var­i­ous projects.

Get TouchOSC Here

One of the geeky fun things that I did was cre­ate MAX patch that allows me to con­trol the Hammond Organ draw­bar set­tings on my Nord Electro 2 via my iPod Touch. Of course, the but­tons that con­trol the draw­bars work well enough, but I thought it would be nice to be able to see all of the set­tings for both the upper and lower draw­bars at the same time — and be able to manip­u­late them both simutaneously!

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