Dear Friends,

I'm a vvvery occasional Pd user, mainly just so as to understand a bit about what people like you all are doing.

And, I wonder why so much of it all is based upon *samples*, whether from inventory or recording-on-the-spot.

Are there any live-sound processors I should be looking at?

Thanks in advance for any inputs I can have on this.

And keep well all ~ Shankar

could you be more specific in what you want the live sound processor to do?

I think this is a cultural question, not a technical one Shankar, and there's a cultural answer. For almost 15 years in "the west" there's been an industry pushing quick and easy solutions to making music. That quick and easy approach is "buy our sample libaries".

I could write you a PhD thesis type essay on why this sucks, why the sample peddlers
have triumphed over the possiblity of human programmable synthesisers, why the cult of emulation and "hip hop" producers sampling loops of other peoples records has brought music down to the lowest common denominator. But I can sum it up in
one... creativity is hard. (And nobody wants to pay for it any longer, or invest
time in cultivating it)

I'm trying, in my own gentle way, to spread a little understanding and fresh enthusiasm for what I think has become a hidden art. Really understanding sound and synthesis is orders of magnitude (if there were such a scale) more difficult than grabbing a breakbeat from a record or going out with a microphone to collect material. Music making with preset tools has become so easy, and producers so lazy, that even the top paid studio producers do little except arrange other peoples work, and many lack even the most basic engineering skills to do recording and preproduction work on live material. Everyone wants to be a musician these days and put their "original" creations up on MySpace, and they can be - with Acid, FruityLoops and Reason you can just audition a few loops, press the "good" button and voila! Except your "original creation" is just a permutation on the same sound everybody else is making. That's why much music is so dreary, predictable and stale these days I think. The mainstream tools have become so rigid that it's impossible to subvert their use, and subversion is the essence of creative art.

Anyway, it would be arrogant to judge other peoples approach to music making this way. I myself spent many years hooked into the cult of sampling and making music
from other peoples work - it just became a boring creative cul-de-sac.

However, I would argue as a professional producer who has seen the industry go though many changes that the easy route to music making with sample libraries, combined with the mainstream medias greed for fast and cheap products has basically killed off a generation of really creative musicians and producers.

I've revised my paraphrasing of Miller about "undoing the sampling revolution".
There never was a sampling revolution. Sampling is the status quo, and the synthetic
revolution is still waiting to happen.

I say, stick with Pd, put in the effort to really understand manipulating and creating sound from first principles and you will harvest the fruits of its power and let your genuine creativity shine through.

Hello Jon.

Not too important 'what' the patch does. For that I'm beginning to learn that the PureData potential is almost *anything*

My question was more about, for example, the fact that every variety of delay that I've tried needs a "record" intervention to first gather and then act upon an audio-slice.

As opposed to this, again for example, my el cheapo hardware guitar processor can affect audio input on the fly.

I'm sure I'm missing something important somewhere.

Keep well ~ S s s

Thanks Obiwannabe,

I'll agree that there is probably a cultural chasm I am trying to look across,..

... but not on account of the tools and practices having not come *to* us.

I think the issue at our end is more that the tools and practices have not sprung *from* us.

For example, I've been networking e-Creative Practitioners of all sorts all across the world for some years now, and so, I've been lucky enough to be able to predict when several individual practices were to spill into the domain of *public practices*.

And so I did with music too,.. but without a clue to the decimation we saw over the past few years. As you say, it "has basically killed off a generation of really creative musicians and producers".

In fact, I know of at least two large TV-production houses here in India who've entirely dispensed with professional musicians, by just bumping 1-2 junior executives into learning Reason and/or FruityLoops,.. as an additional skill. Meanwhile, some others now offer external professionals as little as $50-100 for original jingles and programme ids.

And that really hurt for a guy like me, who had always held that music would be one of the last primary creative skills to fall into the domain of public practices, because a very-very special spark is needed to drive every good musician.

So, it was a reeeeeaaal pleasure for me to begin to learn, earlier this year (mainly from Lawrence Casserley), that what had actually happened to the cutting-edge of music and creative-audio was that it was entirely elsewhere!

But music is not my primary preoccupation, so I've been slow about expanding my comprehension of what is happening with Max & Pd and so on, while my developing actual skills lags even further behind.

And yes, I am also conscious that all of this is so new and so 'foreign' to so many of us, that we all also run the risk of falling into the same old traps of fascination and infatuation that have always yielded and also legitimized so much nonsense from every new medium in its infancy.

To cap that, I also do believe that the old need not always give way entirely to the new ~ by which I mean that surely good evolution ideally carries goodies forward.

For example, if I apply a parallel delay to the live-performance of a guitarist in realtime, it can be said that his performance itself might be carried forward by this technological empowerment. However, if I first *record* just an audio-slice of the guitarist and then play that back with a delay, whether alongside his ongoing performance or otherwise, then that can surely be seen to be the genesis of something else altogether.

Which brings me back to my original question ~ probably grounded in ignorance or perhaps just a quest for oversimplifaction.

"Why does not a patch as follows:

[adc~]
/ \
/ [Delay 500]
/ /
[dac~]

simply yield a realtime signal at left along with a delayed signal at right?"

I know it sounds stupid, but after all, why not?

Keep well ~ Shankar

[adc~]
| \
| [delwrite $0-delayline 500]
|
|
| [delread $0-delayline 500]
| /
[dac~]

Hello shankar,

A piece of knowledge that might be necessary for your further experiments -

Pd has two kinds of signals. It is just like Csound or Max in this respect. There are audio signals which shift blocks of sound around the program and there are control signals which are messages giving instructions (usually to things which operate on audio signals). These two rarely mix, they are actually computed at different rates. But they work together in a patch.

In your question you ask why the [delay] object will not delay the right-hand signal. The [delay] is a unit that operates on control messages, and you are trying to operate on an audio signal. If you look carefully in the console you will see a warning saying "audio signal connected to control inlet" or something. The object you need (actually two) is the [delwrite~] and [delread~] pair.

So...

[adc~]
| \
| [delwrite~ name 500]
|
| [delread~ name 500]
\ /
[dac~]

Notice that they aren't connected, they are bound by the "name" which
means many reads and writes can happen on the same delay buffer.

" Meanwhile, some others now offer external professionals as little as $50-100 for original jingles and programme ids."

LOL! I've had worse here in England The BBC always paid me well. I know the idea of a national station is a very socialist idea, especially one funded by mandatory taxes, but I can't say they didn't maintain high standards and pay for it. I think I did some of my best work then and I really enjoyed the process. Work for the independents just got thinner and thinner through 1998-2002. Corporations like Endymol were tight fisted misers to put it nicely. The payment me and my colleagues got for Big Brother was insulting considering the level of expertise we brought to the gig. Now I realise how much money they made from that awful program I feel quite sick But it's all a learning experience. A trick they do over here in the UK is called the pitching system, that's where they get 8 or 10 groups to do the work for one slot and pick the best one. While being the epitome of modern capitalism it is also an unworkable economic bonfire of effort and talent. So fuck them, let them scrape the barrel for 10 year old library music and standard midi files, and let their audiences judge them on it. Anyway, I'm sounding old now, but I don't feel it, I'm very bullish about the future with tools like Pd in my hands.

"So, it was a reeeeeaaal pleasure for me to begin to learn, earlier this year (mainly from Lawrence Casserley), that what had actually happened to the cutting-edge of music and creative-audio was that it was entirely elsewhere!"

Yep, right now all the really cool stuff is right on the fringes. I think these things go through cycles.We are at the nadir of the midi-sampling phase, on the tail end of the old and new tools and new processes are bubbling up from the underground again and I feel happy to be on that wave. It takes so long for the mainstream to tune in that the party is always over by the time they show up in their suits, chequebook in hand. But I think this time something quite different is going on because the current media giants are such dinosaurs who cannot integrate the synaesthetic and convergent work of the new progressives perhaps an entire new movement will have time to grow before it is siezed.

"To cap that, I also do believe that the old need not always give way entirely to the new ~ by which I mean that surely good evolution ideally carries goodies forward"

Absolutely, it would be foolish to reject well established techniques out of hand. That's what the box shifters in Japan would like for us, to forget our technical and artistic history and be wholly dependent on mysterious hidden technology that writes and produces sanitised music. If anything I strive to preserve old wisdom in a new context, for the reason I said that many vital skills like recording, compression, EQ are becoming lost arts because nobody cares about quality much now and these are skills not taught properly on music technology courses any longer. Sampling and MIDI will always have their place somewhere. Also, composition and music are not taught in British schools any longer, so there's an "artistic recession" emerging here with a whole generation of kids who think all music is just made by stitching prefab loops together and a growing disconnect between composition, production and performance. But history shows that the new wave always subverts something quite unexpectedly. Now that the media nazis have all our history owned and locked down for the next 100 years I expect it will come from somewhere very surprising...who knows, a classical renaisance? Whatever, the next "punk" is not going to come out of proprietry systems, it is going to be an open source thing I think.

btw, I have a half built waveshaping sitar for you here on my desktop, but if you want
to play with a similar thing while I finish it have a look at
http://www.obiwannabe.co.uk/html/music/6SS/six-waveshaper.html

best regards
andy

LOL Hardoff, we both picked 500ms

spooky!

Thank you Hardoff,
Thank you Andy,

Actually, I did not mean that patch literally, but thanks for the quick throughput.

Interesting to know about that business of two separate data-streams, especially that it seems to be so obvious that it should be so ........ after one gets to know of it~:o)

What I was actually wondering was why we/I seem to see so little of this sort of processing, as opposed to patches that work with short bits of sound(s) or just outright sound synthesis.

I've downloaded the synth patches off that page of yours and hope to have a proper look at them sometime this week. Meanwhile, the other fellow sounds fascinating.

Keep well ~ Shankar