#MAX MSP PATCH#
If my experience with max has taught me anything it’s this: forget about creating the “perfect system” or patch that has every feature you could ever dream of – paradoxically, these are the projects that usually lead to despair, boredom, or wanting to give up on max completely. the point when I gave up trying to do things a normal coding workflow and accepted the weird “max friendly” workflow (which is essentially hard-coding) is really when max started clicking for me as a useful tool for music creation - it can sometimes just lend itself to less flexible tools that are less useful to others.
#MAX MSP CODE#
focus instead on making small things that serve a specific and finite function (max for live is great for this) – these are the patches that i keep returning to after years and consistently yield the most musically-satisfying results.ġ++++ this, def been burned by the too many features rabbit hole before - the less flexible patches are the ones I feel more inclined to share.Īs I’ve grown w/ max I’ve definitely learned to appreciate these limitations though - learned to spend less time and make prototypes rather than complete things, which lends more time to actually making stuff with the code you’ve created. i still use these in every patch, it’s like my own little dialect within the language of max: i went through the exercise about 10 years ago of nicely encapsulating and documenting about 50 abstractions, things like list processing and encoding/decoding that i found myself using a lot. “why do i have to waste 3 days to build the list processing object i want? this is so obvious, why can’t the program just ship with something robust and easy-to-use?” but, as time has passed, i can see that the exercise of building the most unsexy things has taught me many valuable lessons and has opened up compositional possibilities that i never would have found otherwise.Īs you solve these little technical hurdles, you can also start to build a vocabulary of code that can be used again and again. The thing i found really frustrating about max at the beginning (and still do, from time to time) was how many seemingly “basic” things you had to build for yourself. (i wrote a couple articles on using max for acoustic composition and realtime notation here / here / here.) using it as a generative environment for harmonic and rhythmic data that can be traditionally notated for acoustic instruments. the stuff i’ve been doing with it lately is more on the composition side, i.e. I can say that learning it has deeply influenced my entire conceptual understanding of music, allowing new points of access to composition, synthesis, eurorack, etc. love the musical things it’s enabled me to do, hate how many years of my life have been sucked away into it). I would describe my relationship with max as love/hate (i.e.
Longtime max user here… happy to see this thread exist.
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