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My Conversation to MAX/MSP - Now Includes Looper



I just thought I'd update everyone on my conversion to MAX/MSP. It has taken an interesting turn lately.

Metamorphosis Phase I  - "First Taste of MAX/MSP"
 
Several months ago, I had created a VST host with MAX/MSP, which worked great and basically allowed me to host all of the VSTs that I was hosting in Chainer, and Energy XT before that. These VSTs included Mobius (for looping), Reaktor, and several of my own MAX/MSP patches (not VSTs). Great system. I was also able to control Mobius and Reaktor with my Behringer FCB, as they were communicating directly with the controller and not via MIDI settings or wiring in MAX/MSP. That was convenient.
 
Metamorphosis Phase II - "Back to the Comfort Zone"
 
A few months after the above transition, I became disgruntled with the difficulty I was experiencing controlling my VST (not Mobius or Reaktor) parameters in MAX/MSP. MAX/MSP allows this sort of thing with its VST object and some MIDI objects/wiring, but the learning curve was just too high for me at the time, to revise my host code with all the MIDI related wiring and objects to get my Behringer FCB to communicate with my VSTs via MIDI in MAX/MSP.  

So, I went back to Chainer (my original system), and converted my MAX/MSP patches to VSTs that I could use them.
 
Metamorphosis Phase III - "The Final Leap"
 
A few more months past.  At this time, I have a change of feeling with the complexity of my VST host and system. I had over 40 VST programs in Chainer, and they became a creative burden. Sometimes, one can just have too much, and this became distracting for me. I felt that I was placing too much emphasis on my cool VST sounds and not the music making aspect.
 
So I had an epiphany and decided that I was going back to MAX/MSP and dropping ALL of my VSTs (all $1200 worth), and using only Reaktor (as a VST inside MAX), and my own MAX/MSP patches. Oh, what a relief. Jeff Kaiser even helped me add the necessary MIDI code and wiring to control my MAX/MSP patches with the Behringer FCB.
 
However, I struggled several months with controlling Reaktor with my MIDI controller. Since I activated MIDI in MAX/MSP, it highjacked the MIDI port and made direct communication between the Reaktor VST and my Behringer impossible. After several months, resolved that issue, and now I can control all my effect parameters in Reaktor, while inside MAX/MSP. Beautiful.
 
So, you might be wondering now, this being a loop based discussion forum, what happened to Mobius? Well, after several discussions with Jeff Kaiser and thinking about what features I really used in Mobius, and what was important to me as a musician, I switch to Kaiser's MAX/MSP looper construction kit...the "Kaiser Looper".  The kit is exactly that. You can take it and then build on it, add buttons, features, more looping tracks, etc. This is what I ended up with to suit my needs:
 
4 separate stereo looping tracks with the following:
 
- Record (no overdub)
- Play
- Reset
- Reverse
- Half speed
- Double speed
- Half Speed/Reverse
- Forward
- Stop
- Variable speed (forward and backward) controlled via a knob
- Track volume
- Track pan
 
All the above are controlled with my Behringer FCB, via a MIDI program change or one of my two expression pedals.
 
You'll note that there are a lot of looper features not in the list above, which many people expect in a sophisticated looper. The missing features are indeed the case, though I would argue that the sophistication is relative. Personally, I am able to get by with features I listed, and they meet 99% of my creative needs. Some of the cool features that I used in Mobius, EDPs, or Looperative (such as multiply, substitution, scripting, etc), were nice, but I found that most of the time they were not necessary to express myself...and in some cases, as with too many VST, distracted me from the music composition aspect of my own personal performance style and philosophy.
 
Long story short, I feel a sense of relief with my new system. It is streamlined, and now I can focus on the fun part, which is creating my own custom MAX patches (for example, a MAX patch that emulates the old Roland GR300 guitar synth).
 
In any event, you can find out more about Kaiser's looper construction kit here (Jeff will be adding an updated version later):
 
 
My gear setup here, including screen shot of my MAX system:
 
 
Cheers,
 
Kris
 
**************************************************************************
Krispen Hartung
www.krispenhartung.com / www.myspace.com/krispenhartung
info@krispenhartung.com / 1.208.724.5603
Discography - http://www.krispenhartung.com/catalogue.htm
CD Baby Discography: http://cdbaby.com/all/khartung