hi guys, i am very interested in pd. i have been writing and producing music on computers for 8 years and have never come across an appplication like this. the possibilities of pd seem huge and exciting.

my problem is that i have no experience of programming whatsoever, i do not understand binary or boolean. i spent a couple of hours messing about with pd the other night, just with the examples in the help files, seeing what it can do to sound and it is very exciting.

what i would like to find out is roughly how long it would take me to learn pd and also some further indications of the application of the software in music production; what are the coolest things you've done with it?
it seems like there is a lot of maths involved, that i have never had to think about before, it is not as simple as lfo's and adsr envelopes, these themselves havve to be made from maths that i dont understand at the moment.

anyway, how long did it take you guys to learn pd, and what are the cooolest things it can do?

any advice much appreciated

cheers
ali

>the possibilities of pd seem huge and exciting.

this is true..in answer to your question "is it worth it?" ...well of course

>i spent a couple of hours messing about with pd the other night, just with the examples in the help files, seeing what it can do to sound and it is very exciting.

ok...good start ali. the way i learnt was to make a few projects for myself, for audio devices which i wanted to make. ...then just went through the help files and whatnot to find bits which i needed to make these devices.

my first project was a sequencer that would sync up 8 different soundfiles and play bits of each sample in order...ie 1 beat from the 1st sample, followed by 1 beat from the 2nd sample, then a beat from the 3rd,,,,,etc

it took about 1 month to learn enough pd to get that far. maybe 100 hours.


as far as the coolest things i have done...pd lets me actually play live now...live imprrovised jams based on sample loops which i can manipulate in realtime. i use inputs from my computer's keyboard to trigger effects and change sequences and pitch and whatever. even the guys using ableton "live" or whatever aren't really doing much live improvisation like that, so that's pretty exciting i guess. there are some examples of my tracks in older threads on this board...might not be your cup of tea exactly, but they're all recorded dirtectly out of pd, with no further editing or sequencing or anything.

:::

about the maths: it depends on what you want to do really....with the stuff i do, sample sequencing and resequencign and stuff, the maths is pretty simple...dividing a loop into 32 parts, multiplying sample frequencies by time...etc. it's pretty basic primary school maths for that, which is the way i like it, cos i'd rather be making rock n roll than sitting down and doing my maths homework.

however, i still haven't got far with doign actual synthesis from sine waves and stuff, cos that does involve some higher maths. i'll leave that stuff to the people who are interested in it i reckon. there's also lots of amazing stuff with fourier analysis that i'd love to understand, but it's a bit hard for me.

so basically, there are lots of things you can do without too much math, but i'm sure that the people who understand it are gonna have an advantage.

anyway nice to meet you...any more questions, this is your place. good to see a few more people here lately too, it was a bit quiet for a while.

hardoff, thanks for your advice. it has encouraged me to continue trying to figure pd out. i did enjoy some of your music from the output forum, i think someone compared it to an old pinballl machine, i thought the sounds were pretty amazing.
thanks again
ali