[PD] MOD Trackers (was Pd to CV for a Moog) (OT)

padawan12 padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Wed Sep 13 18:22:02 CEST 2006


On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:08:04 -0500
"Kyle Klipowicz" <kyleklip at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's pretty awesome that so many of us grew up using MOD trackers as
> our first (or early) computer music environments.

Kinda missed out on trackers, somewhere between beeps on the BBC micro
or Commodore 64, and my first Atari ST with Cubase. My first ever "computer
music" was on a ZX81, which doesn't have a soundcard, but if you put a radio
next to it you could hear the programs running off station at 4MHz because
the crappy little plastic box had no EMI shielding, so by inserting nops
in a loop you could make it play musical sequences ;) 

I never really liked or took to the tracker list interface,
music somehow moves from left to right for me, with pitch on the y axis.
It probably comes from reading music score once. 


> If I were a strict
> empiricist with no knowledge of logical proof, I'd boldly say that MOD
> tracker => Pd.  But, alas, so many of my heyday tracking crew
> haven't yet taken the plunge, no matter how often I try to market for Pd.
> 
> ~Kyle


I think of things like Spice as the precursors to Pd, in a way it couldn't 
be more different under the hood than a list based sequencer. Although Miller
and others talk about Pd as a 'language', always with quote marks, it
doesn't have that syntactic structure or computational causality either. I think
it's very open because it's really a netlist of objects. You can make it what
you like and because it's open ended "meta-application" rather than a specific
tool we end up with a thousand different views of the same thing, cos everybody
invents their own. Like it's odd, but nice, that sequencing is done so many
different ways and people come onto the list asking how do I make a data recorder
and how do I store sequence data in files, because even those things aren't 
obvious givens. It took me 6 months to find [qlist]. Just about every piece
of "music" I write in Pd is still either an algorithmic process or counters
and selects banging messages. It's a weird way to compose, but it makes sense
and it's fun. Don't think I miss using pianoroll editors at all really. 
Pd has done some weird things to my take on music. I just got back into hooking
up a keyboard again and playing MIDI, which I haven't done for almost 2 years!
Pd split my musical world in two,  the keyboard just became a thing that makes
sounds you can play, which did my enjoyment and performance skills a bit of good. 
So I got into using the keyboard to work things out musically, but then just doing
it in Pd without all that pissing about trying to play it and quantising sequences.
I'm hooking up some examples with [midinote] and using adsr envelopes again and
the horror of that whole brittle realtime thing with stuck note-offs hanging is
like being kicked back to 1985.

oops, prattling on... anyway trackers - pretty sure you could build a great tracker
file handler in Pd to import and play some old memories. That would be sweet. A night
of listening to my fave unreal level tunes be a laugh. If I remember right a tracker
file stores the samples as well as the timing sequences so they'd have
to be read into arrays. (?)

a.




> 
> 
> On 9/12/06, Claude Heiland-Allen <claudiusmaximus at goto10.org> wrote:
> > B. Bogart wrote:
> > > OctaMED on an Amiga! I don't know what year that was...
> > >
> > > .b.
> >
> > Me too, from about 1994 to 2002.
> >
> > > Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> > >> On Tue, 12 Sep 2006, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
> >  >>
> > >> If I start again, I might switch to Trakka, or anything else Pd-based;
> > >> but I'd want something fairly compatible with .MOD, .S3M and .IT formats.
> >
> > I wrote an OctaMED .med to GridFlow+Pd converter once, in Java (I hadn't
> > learned enough C at that point).  It worked, but the Pd player skipped
> > horribly when switching patterns, because they were displayed in a huge
> > number of floatatoms...
> >
> > I will rewrite that converter in C (or maybe I'll learn enough Ruby to
> > be able to write a GridFlow Pd object to load .med directly) once Trakka
> > is stable (in terms of functionality/API/etc, it hasn't crashed yet..).
> >
> > Here's a current screenshot:
> >
> > http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org/image.php?image=gallery/coding/pd-patches/trakka-0.0.3.png&size=original
> >
> >
> > Claude
> > --
> > http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
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> http://perhapsidid.blogspot.com
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