PureData: Purity and zen

[qersty]

So there is this program...

idk how anybody else feels but PureData has been laughing me in my face since i was 13, I swear it and I want it to stop. I need to prove myself to PureData that I'm not stupid, all ambition no skill.

It all started with Meshuggah, kinda, we'll get there. Fredrik, their guitarist, had something called the 33. What the 33 was was a breath controller stuck to a joystick so that you could not just control the volume of your guitar by blowing into a tube, you could also control a filter by moving your head around. The first 33 was analog (cool! juicy! we love analog filters!) but why I am complaining on the internet is the last version, which was unanalog, a MIDI implementation. The effects unit to accompany this controller was a pretty advanced modular synth emulator made by Nord. The Nord Modular is awesome, even today, but I have never acquired one. there is however a demo version that is still available to get, keyword: demo version. The demo version is this incredible fun to play with and has taught me tons about synthesis and signal processing, it also has restrictions that make you really remember that it is a demo version. Limited MIDI-abilty and [f]no processing of external audio[/f] being notable restrictions.

So there is this modular environment that I am very comfortable with and I am pretty knowledgible in how it works that I in practice cannot use because I have no way to conveniently interface it with any other instrument or software. Thank god there is an open source, well supported programming language that uses modular blocks that is widely supported and just blows that windows 98 ass Reactor wannabe out of the water, right? Yeah, right!

I just can't, I mean I can but that just makes it worse. It is testing me. I have university lessons in Pd but I still havent gotten my lazy ass past making a simple ring modulator. I have spent way too many hours looking at and skipping tutorials that takes way too long explaining the basics of synths that I already know only to have missed the basic stuff I need to make the cool things I want to. Like if i want to make a crude glitch effect I know exactly how to use multiplexing to skip though delay lines in Nord Modular but I haven't got the finesse to learn enough PureData to do it.

Yeah I probably am way dumber than I think and just need to work in Pd to get things done but I have way to many things I wanna do at the same time. I have gone through so many stupid loops to not have to use PureData and that is just counting the things I could have used google to download somebody elses program.

Is this just the DSP gods telling me I am too dumb to move past offset -> muff -> twin reverb????

Whatever, complaining just makes me more stupider...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_JXgpiV4sU[/youtube]

[alexsga]

i prefer downloading free max msp patches online, ive rarely not been able to find what crazy vst idea i was looking for that someones already made for me

[qersty]

i maked a subharmonics thing

[Gone Fission]

pd has gotta be tough because of all the potential use cases. So hitting others’ preset examples might not work with the control setup and do the processing/synthing/sampling you want. But they might give ideas. (Scroll down—three buckets of pd.)

https://patchstorage.com/

[01010111]

The death of written explanations on personal blogs and the rise of youtube tutorials makes stuff like this extremely hard. You need five seconds of an hour long video to accomplish what you need, and god help you if you space out during the five second window you need.

I run into this all the time at work, and it's a big reason why I haven't pursued PD. It seems super powerful, but the process and learning curve would feel too much like trying to learn how to do something new at work.

[qersty]

Like I've tried reading things too but i still kinda fall into the trap of not knowing when I can dip in and when I will have missed very vital information when reading. I just find it very boring to read things that are written very accessibly for musicians and not sinusoidal-brained freaks. While doing some attempting, i did find the built in help meny somewhat helpful but i still had to look up what a lot of things do. Reality says that i maybe have to finally learn hoe to take notes. However, i did manage to make an oscilloscope and understand it. I think i have already forgotten how though.

I need to find out some easy goal to work to so I know what to learn

[Deltaphoenix]

I have a friend that is a PD wizard, he has been using it since the 90s. He has a crazy library of now unavailable resources & he is a college professor that teaches audio and visual design. At this point, if he is riffing on an idea, he has built what are essentially a ton of “sub-modules” and he can quickly start building. Critter Guiteri used to pay him to make PD patches for the Organelle. Then a fair amount of Organelle users were doing his Patreon where he would teach PD and release exclusive patches. Eventually, people were reaching out asking to pay him to build them custom patches. He got over it when he realized most of the patreon supporters weren’t trying to learn PD. It was somewhere around then that another Organelle power user with the username Technobear created some interface or something called ORAC that made it so non-PD literate people could make patches on the Organelle. My buddy thought that was a bunch of garbage, apparently the flexibility of PD disappeared either ORAC and the users of that were using the Organelle “at Technobears mercy” and then he ditched that toy as the joy was gone. IDK why I went down this one rabbit hole.
My buddy has done bat shit crazy visuals for me in an amphitheater at the University of Florida with PD while I did a Buchla piece.
My buddy is an opinionated genius and would be amazing to learn from. I understand PD a bit from just being around this guy for years but I just don’t get off on working that way so I haven’t wanted to learn that much.

[dubkitty]

conceptually, isn’t this idea (constructing patches as discrete things to solve a particular problem) rather similar to, well, building stomp boxes to get specific sounds? i’m not suggesting that it’d be fun, but it’s not wildly different from a decision-makers standpoint. not arguing, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.

[qersty]

conceptually, isn’t this idea (constructing patches as discrete things to solve a particular problem) rather similar to, well, building stomp boxes to get specific sounds? i’m not suggesting that it’d be fun, but it’s not wildly different from a decision-makers standpoint. not arguing, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.

Well yeah it is (if igy right). I think the easy mode of FV-1 programming is something similar to pure data as well, also axoloti thing that sadly just disappeared.

I have a friend that is a PD wizard, he has been using it since the 90s. He has a crazy library of now unavailable resources & he is a college professor that teaches audio and visual design. At this point, if he is riffing on an idea, he has built what are essentially a ton of “sub-modules” and he can quickly start building. Critter Guiteri used to pay him to make PD patches for the Organelle. Then a fair amount of Organelle users were doing his Patreon where he would teach PD and release exclusive patches. Eventually, people were reaching out asking to pay him to build them custom patches. He got over it when he realized most of the patreon supporters weren’t trying to learn PD. It was somewhere around then that another Organelle power user with the username Technobear created some interface or something called ORAC that made it so non-PD literate people could make patches on the Organelle. My buddy thought that was a bunch of garbage, apparently the flexibility of PD disappeared either ORAC and the users of that were using the Organelle “at Technobears mercy” and then he ditched that toy as the joy was gone. IDK why I went down this one rabbit hole.
My buddy has done bat shit crazy visuals for me in an amphitheater at the University of Florida with PD while I did a Buchla piece.
My buddy is an opinionated genius and would be amazing to learn from. I understand PD a bit from just being around this guy for years but I just don’t get off on working that way so I haven’t wanted to learn that much.

That's cool as hell. Sucks that he had those people asking just for him to make stuff. tho mad respect that he was into it for the teaching. I havent even looked at what Pd can do for visuals, ill get there once ive wraped myself around the audio stuff

[Dr. Sherman Sticks M.D.]

def helps to pick something u are interested in making and try to stay on that.. then build off it. add to it.
its fun to fuck around and build things in your free time
doesn't have to have a beginning or an end
or a reason or a rhyme

for me i use it sometimes. learn a new thing. don't use it for long periods of time.
pick it up again. learn something else new. maybe add it in back in w/ the old.
u really can do *almost* anything in pure data if u have the cpu cycles
but u also don't really have to do anything
gift and a curse sometimes

usually the fun part is fun but only like 10% of the process
then there is the inevitable not as fun slugde of getting it to all work nicely together, the logic, etc etc
that is the other 90%

pd changed my life tho