Need to keep reminding myself to crawl and walk before I run.
I’m still a potato, looking up from my back while lying on the baby mat. 
Need to keep reminding myself to crawl and walk before I run.
I’m still a potato, looking up from my back while lying on the baby mat. 
For my part, I came to Max specifically for gen~. I didn’t care about any of that loopy box-drawing stuff! I just wanted to code some DSP 
…and I bounced off it. Hard. A number of times.
Max — that is Max by itself without MSP or gen~ or jitter or any of that — it its own language and environment with a bunch of its own conventions that have been built up and extended upon for literally 40 years now. Trying to understand any part of it without understanding that core first really handicapped me. It wasn’t until doing the Max tutorials and playing around pretty extensively in that space that I started gaining any traction with the rest.
YMMV, of course. We all learn differently. But IMHO taking the time and doing the tutorials — even the ones that don’t seem to touch on what you want to use Max for — gives people the best chance of success.
Here’s an mc version of the simple KS algorithm:
Perhaps this is modal synthesis in a sense, but who cares. It sounds nice and metalilc when you turn up the filter a bit. I restricted the gain in the feedback to go between 0 db and -3 db because not much seems to happen outside that range and there’s a limiter in the feedback loop which seems to work better with input signals. The limiter also doubles as a dc blocker.
Edit: forgot to say, keep pressing ‘deviate’ for new variations of sounds. It’s a randomising function.
You could also use mc.gen~ for this but I’m not quite there yet. Maybe that could be my first serious gen project.
Hope you enjoy!
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I’ve been messing around with Karplus-Strong recently and remembered I needed to revisit this thread - lotta good stuff in here.
@Ess: Using a simple impulse (or one shot ramp, as you call it) as an exciter gives such a thick percussive sound when compared to using noise – especially when you invert the signal in the delay loop (or, in this patch, use negative decay). Love it!
I’ve been trying to trying to use samples as exciters like the Erica Synths Steampipe does (seen here at about 21:35). I haven’t been super satisfied with the results, but this morning I tried throwing an envelope follower in the mix to better trigger Karplus-Strong. It’s sounding better, but would love to hear if anybody else has ideas on this…
Here’s my attempt:
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-----------end_max5_patcher-----------
edit: just realized I was using the wrong output of my envelope follower ![]()
still sounds alright tho