Best products from r/MaxMSP

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

Time and chance. Off the top of my head, maybe this would be a nice read: Step by Step: Adventures in Sequencing with Max/MSP; and/or this one which also has some stuff on working with lists: Electronic Music and Sound Design - Theory and Practice with Max/MSP.

Have you searched the forum on Cycling74? People there have always been really nice with feedback and sharing patches which you could use as an offset for what it is you want to do. There are several libs for this stuff too or you could work in Max from general concepts such as these Create Brian Eno style generative music.

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If I remember something concrete I'll come back and add it :b

It's trivial to mix multiple audio streams in real-time with Max. You can just feed all your outputs into a single input of a DAC with inline *~ objects whose right input accepts a multiplier to control gain. There are lots of more sophisticated way to do it.

These books have a lot of info on this topic as you get more advanced.

http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8890548452/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422140884&sr=8-1&keywords=electronic+music+max+msp

Thank you for your fast response, some things are clearer to me now. I was reading this book http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8890548401 which is amazing and it explained the same thing and why you would use the msp object and how data transfer would be really slow for audio uses. My other question is how do different objects work, for example I have a cycle object and a groove object, what they are outputting is a signal. In one case the cycle objects outputs a sinus wave and in the other the groove object reads audio from a selected buffer and then it out puts it, but in the end all they are out putting is a signal, but how does that signal differ? I know it's different but other than listening to it, is there a way to measure it.. If that question makes sense. I'm failing to make the connection, I know what these 2 different objects do on their own and when to use them and I can go on and continue using them with success but since I can't "see" the output they give (for example with the print object) it kind of makes me hard understanding sometimes if certain objects need a signal input or not to work. I guess that may come to me learning most of the objects and memorising what they need to function. For example the cylcle object needs a data variable for input for the frequency it needs to output, which is fair enough I understand that the object is just fed a given number and then it generates that number as form as a frequency signal in the form of a sinus wave but then If I wanted to make a poormans envelope out of the output using multiplication and a line~ object, why do I use the line object, why do I need to mix 2 signals, shouldn't the amplitude be stated with a normal line object and numbers and then it should do it the way I gave a data variable to the cycle object in the first place. Any suggestions on learning material, apart from the max msp tutorials and this book that I have?

> https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8890548401

ya this book is amazing, get it

https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Music-Sound-Design-Practice/dp/8890548401
It is expecially geared toward sound design and synthesis. Really nice book, there are exercises and various learning material (made with max, so you can open it and look inside) included.

How bout something like this: intel compute stick 1st gen, $99

Along with the tutorials, I also recommend the book Electronic Music and Sound Design. It's handy sometimes to have a book in your hands that you can flip through. It's a little pricey, so if you can get it on an interlibrary loan from a local library, I'd check it out. The book is primarily based on sound synthesis, but there's a little bit of everything in there.

Posted this in pD too!

Andy Farnell's book, Designing Sound models combustion engines in pD. I believe he uses waveguides, not sure. You should be able to borrow a copy from the library.

You can find all the pD code examples from his book here. Look under machines and cars.