That's very sound advice, Darek! I followed(/am following) a very similar trajectory.
What I'd add to that:
Above all, don't think that you need to only use Pd for everything. It's a great tool, but can bog you down from truly creating things if you are stuck reinventing the wheel every time you get the time and urge to make music/art.
It's perfectly acceptible to use Pd for its strengths, but then another application when Pd is less-than-adequate (or requiring dozens of hours to make it adequate).
I recall a quote from Miller that paraphrased said something to the effect that Pd is like the bash shell in UNIX. You wouldn't write a word processor in a bash script, but it's great for rapidly prototyping a quick and useful solution.
~Kyle
On 2/20/07, Derek Holzer derek@umatic.nl wrote:
Hi Jared,
for what it's worth, I've been working with PD for years and I still can't read most other people's patches ;-)
Everybody has their own style, their own "handwriting", and some are more readable than others. Diving right into somebody's finished patch is pretty difficult for an experienced user, and almost impossible for a beginner, I'd say! If you were trying to learn German, would you start by reading Goethe?
I learned PD by reproducing things which I understood already in stages, such as going from a quad-panner, a mixer, a sampler and a delay-network, to complex feedback-FM, a granular synthesizer and an algorithmic sequencer...etc etc. First I played around with the built-in examples, then I made simple things and basic utilities. After that I went back to the examples I skipped and figured out what I did wrong, and then I moved on to "porting" things from other apps I had used before and knew the structure of (AudioMulch units, Reaktor instruments, various VSTs, etc). These kinds of exercises are the ones I think work best. Start from a point you know, and figure out how to do it with the most basic objects in PD. If core PD doesn't do it, then it's time to reach for an external.
best, d.
jared wrote:
obvious similarities, but the more time I spend with PD the more they feel like different beasts. I will definitely go back and start from square one with PD.
-- derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl ---Oblique Strategy # 77: "Give way to your worst impulse"
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