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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

I’ve been having entirely too much fun with this awesome iPhone/iPod Touch application by Intua. I put off buying BeatMaker for a long time because of the 19.99 price tag. When there are so many good music applications for much less, why bother, right?

The reason I bothered was that you can upload custom sounds. I searched and searched for a cheaper application that has this same functionality, but in the end I just gave up and dished out the 20 bucks — it was totally worth it!

I don’t really want to make this a review since there have already been plenty of great reviews on BeatMaker, (you can find a very thorough review here) but I do want to show some of what I have been doing with it.

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After playing around, making beats on the train like the one above, and learning the ins and outs of this app, I finally got around to creating my own kit. I used a collection of samples that I downloaded from freesound.org, (attribution page included in download) and I also made some samples using my keyboard and guitar.

I wanted to have an amount of variety with each sample that I created. The C7_Rhodes, Organ&GuitarVamp, and OrganBass samples are probably all best used after slicing down the audio file to a specific section that you want to use. This isn’t a problem because you can crop down any audio file within BeatMaker easily. Here is a little beat I created with my custom set.

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Tags: BeatMaker, berimbau, drum kit, electric organ, free, guitar, Intua, iphone, ipod touch, rhodes, samples

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!

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

I recently started reading this book after watching Ron Eglash’s lecture on Ted.com. While watching the video I realized that I had no idea what fractals are, or that this particular system of geometry played such a vital role in African culture. Ron Eglash does a great job during this talk on Ted.com of quickly explaining the basics to the uninformed listener, but once I started looking through books (other than his) about fractals in general, I was greeted with page after page of mathematical formulas that I had no idea how to interpret.

The one big plus about Ron Eglash’s book, African Fracals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, is that it starts with the assumption that the reader knows little or nothing about fractals in general. After a thoroughly informative crash course on fractal geometry, the book goes on to systematically examine the importance of this geometric system in all facets of African culture.

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Tags: African, African fractals, anthropology, binary, computer science, eglash, ethnomathematics, fractals, geometry, indigenous design, mathematics

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

When I saw this book on the rack at Kinokuniya I just had to buy it. Japanese culture insists upon it’s homogeneity and the importance of everyone being the same, however once you look slightly below the surface you find this isn’t always the reality. It’s no secret that people even go as far as changing family records at their local town hall, and private investigators are often hired by large companies to check the validity of potential employees lineages. For some reason this dynamic absolutely intrigues me.

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Tags: Ainu, Brazilian Japanese, Burakumin, culture, homogeneity, Japan, Minorities, Zainichi

So, this is my first attempt at making any kind of website for myself. I hope that you enjoy. Please let me know if you have any issues with the functionality of the site, and feel free to leave comments about whatever.