Hi all. I have created several patches with different sounds (synths, samplers, glitches, etc.) and I want to play them live at an ambient party.
Can you please give me some advice on how best to organize these patches properly for the performance - do they all play in one patch or is it not necessary? Does it make sense to use some ready-made mixers from maxmsp or is it just enough to have live.gain for the volume? What is the best way to organize everything so that the computer processor does not load? What are the nuances in general and what should you pay attention to? What must be done and what must not be done?
Good rule of thumb is to ensure that the max scheduler is set to overdrive and audio interrupt is set to On. Also depends on how efficient your patching is, which would also apply to-
ā¦ which would also depend how you intend your different sounds/patches to play- ie are they playing together or separately? If together, how are they interacting? Are they interacting at all or are they all doing their own thing? Are you performing/interacting with them at all or are they just being left to do their own thing (ie some sort of algorithmic/generative thing)?
again without knowing the overall nature of the patches/aim of the performance its difficult to answer this one, but if you are mixing multiple sources then id suggest maybe taking a look at, for eg, the mc.live.gain~ help file and see if you can grab something from there
It sounds like you may be new(ish) to Max? Just curious why you wouldnāt perhaps use a DAW for this performance, which may be a little more fail-safe in your situation than juggling Max patches (which may be a bit precarious if youāre not wholly familiar with it)?
I think @christianlukegates has covered most of it to be fair and without knowing more details itās hard to offer specific help.
Iāve been Maxing since the start of the year and I have used it a couple of times for live performance. However, Iāve used it very sparingly, mostly as an audio mixer and VST host.
One thing I do like to do is use presentation mode to display only the parameters and information/controls that Iām going to use in the performance, which I can then either map to a controller or adjust with the trackpad on my laptop without the visual distraction of loads of objects and patching going on.
For me, learning Max seems to be a lot about trial and error, getting loads of stuff wrong (sometimes publicly) before you figure out how to make it work for you.
My advice would be to use send~ and receive~ objects.
One separate patch for the audio output. This way you can freely load new āsoundā patchers and play them one after the other.
my patches are not tied to the same tempo. I just want to turn them on whenever I want and play some pads, samples, glitches etc when i want, creating a soundscape
I thought I was the only one. Keeps it interesting up there for me and on my toes.
Besides, Iāve found the audience likes to hear a fuckup now and then. Not shitty beat matching type fuckups, but real technical issues. They at least least know for sure itās real. Theyāre also impressed when you can deal with it well. And you get mad bonus points if you actually incorporate the fuck up and start mixing it inā¦.
In my large Max projects I follow a modular approach. Each audio/video/DMX generator or whatever it is lives in its own patch. Then I create meta-control patch(es) to orchestrate that bunch. For audio I āll aggregate all signals via send~ receive~ pairs in a DIY mixer patch that sends the mix to audio interface outputs.
When the project is feasible in Liveās structure I might use Max4Live there to not have to build the mixer, timeline, etc myself.
