LOOSE CHANGE

"Loose Change" is a composition I developed for my Computer Music 2 course at Stetson University, Spring 2009. The track was featured on my debut production/eletronic album "Commence." I wanted to use Max/MSP in a similar manner to a DAW such as Pro Tools, Logic, etc. Here, I will outline the patch that was used to create the entire track. To start, here's a snapshot of the whole patch zoomed out. Yes, I know I'm a messy patcher:

The transport object, new to Max 5, is the foundation of this project. I used a select object using the number of bars to trigger events such as volume, attack, note, chord, and rhythm changes. It also allowed me to produce a consistent steady bang throughout the entire patch and easily edit the tempo if necessary.

Next, I used counters to turn the bangs from the transport into sequences. The counter counts 16 beats and then I'm using the select object to choose which of those 16 beats I want to trigger a drum sound. Also, you can see I used a switch here to change the bass drum from playing 0 3 4 to 0 2 4 8 11 12 when desired and a gate to turn the snare on and off. the "r snare" is coming from a select object tied to the bar output of the global transport.

Here is a snapshot of what the drum synths look like. You can see white noise being generated by the noise~ object and then using subtractive synthesis to form the drum timbres. This picture is of a snare type sound so i used a mid-ranged peak/notch filter. The bass drum called for a low pass filter and the hi hat, a higher frequency peak filter. Then I'm using an ADSR envelope to control the attack and decay of the filtered noise resulting in an interesting drum sound.

This is the bass generator for the track. You can see the counter/select combination i used before driving the ADSR of the bass. The select in the top right hand corner is selecting bar 200 which then shortens the attack of the bass from 500 ms to 250 ms and also switches a gate between rhythm patterns.

The chord section of the patch is founded on cycles. "1, 2 , 3" are 3 different chords which arrange the midi notes below into chords according to a counter sequencer off the page. At the bottom there is a degrade~ object which turns on when the gate is activated a little ways into the track.

This is the lead section, it shares a lot in common with the chords patch, but features a switcher to choose between available notes, and also a random delay generator for part of the song. The same degrade function is seen at the bottom.

This patch is creating the really high jingly sound towards the middle-end of the track. The sprintf object is being employed to formulate equations for the line object to run on which is varying the attack and decay.

This is two phasors tied together with the sah~ object which, with a delay, constitutes the ambient sound heard at the beginning most clearly, but is used throughout the entire track.

I really enjoyed the unique timbres that Max/MSP had to offer and the almost endless possibilities of connecting attributes of certain instruments to others and letting them affect eachother in various ways. Using Max as a DAW proved to be a difficult yet rewarding challenge that I would definitely attempt again.