Reddit mentions of Composing Interactive Music: Techniques and Ideas Using Max

The best way to learn Max is kind of a tricky subject and I'm sure the other people on here would be able to suggest some more ways, but here are a few that have helped me out:

1. Read the built-in tutorials. They're listed under the Help section as Max tutorials, MSP tutorials, and Jitter tutorials. In case you don't know, Max deals with data and was primarily designed to handle interactions with MIDI. It's grown to encompass more data structures, but MIDI is where it really shines. I'd recommend doing this one first to get a feel for what Max is all about. MSP is audio rate processing and the kind of thing that you're doing now. Jitter is all about matrix operations (linear algebra if you have any experience with that) and is primarily used for processing video and images, though there's a lot of really awesome stuff that you can do with audio from Jitter.
   
2. Watch some of the Delicious tutorials on YouTube. Some of them might be more advanced, but they're really helpful and he teaches you how to make some really awesome stuff. From what I know of the guy that makes them, he has some really impressive credentials.
   
3. Get ideas for projects and hack them together. One of the more fun things about Max is that there are many ways to solve the same problem. Having the ability to go from idea to prototype to working implementation is really useful when you start using Max in a professional (whatever that word means in this context) setting. The ideas can be something like a simple synthesizer, a looping pedal, or an audio effect. Something a friend of mine and I used to do was to pick an audio pluggin that we liked and try to replicate it in Max.
   
4. Pick a topic to focus on and do a few projects in that vein. There are so many different things that you can do with Max that it's worthwhile to get really good at a particular topic. You might want to only build synths for a while. Or, you might be more of an effect guy/girl. Max will do both really well and a bunch of other things too.
   
5. Solve programming puzzles in Max. Remembering that Max is a programming language, try and solve some common programming puzzles that people normally use to learn other programming languages. A quick google search should reveal quite a few of them, but a few more simple ones would be something like getting the Nth Fibonnacci number or reversing a string. Not all of these exercises would be of benefit, but doing a few will really give you a sense of how data flows in Max and what it does well versus what it does badly. For instance, passing numbers around in Max is really easy while dealing with strings can be a real hassle at first.
   
6. This one isn't Max specific, but if you don't already have it, get a grasp on the basic concepts of electronic music and digital signal processing (at least as it relates to audio). Learn about the different forms of audio synthesis such as additive, subtractive, and granular. Learn how sound is represented in the computer. Learn about the basics of filters and what they do to sound. Learn how to implement common audio effects using basic DSP building blocks such as filters and delays. Getting a firm grounding in this kind of stuff will keep you from being what a I refer to as a "knob-twittler electronic musician" or someone who just blindly twists knobs on a synth until something sounds good. Note that there's nothing wrong with this approach and there are many good musicians who make beautiful art with it. But, as Morton Subotnick is fond of pointing out, this approach leaves you completely at the mercy of the people who build the tools that you are using. Max is about a different paradigm, one in which you build your own tools.
   
   Here are a few books that have helped me out in the past:
   
   

• Composing Interactive Music by Todd Winkler
  
  
• Max/MSP/Jitter for Music by VJ Manzo
  
  
• Introduction to Digital Signal Processing by Tae Hong Park This one's my favorite book on the basic concepts in DSP
  
  

If you want to do sound synthesis with MSP, check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8890548401/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371667980&sr=1-5&keywords=sound+design


You can check out Todd Winkler's book for ideas for control data and MIDI:

http://www.amazon.com/Composing-Interactive-Music-Techniques-Ideas/dp/0262731398/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371668024&sr=1-1&keywords=todd+winkler


Check out this guy's youtube tutorials, definitely some of the best that I've found, he's making cool sounds, and you can probably get a lot from building along with him, (I'm pretty sure he works at Cycling'74)

http://www.youtube.com/user/dude837?feature=watch