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?
Imagine learning English by reading Shakespeare. I tried German with Kafka, and, probably for the same reason I like reading him so much in English, it was impossible. Such long sentences. James Joyce learned Italian from Dante Alighieri, and supposedly caused a stir when he went to Italy talking like a medieval person. I obtained a book of Petrarch sonnets a few years ago, and half the words were nowhere in any Italian dictionary.
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.
I've found it impossible to make a granular synthesizer with Pd. I thought I tried everything. I've gone from Csound to Pd, and back to Csound, and found I understood Csound so much better for it. Vanilla Pd is so low-level it's like working on the microsound level the whole time. I don't know if it's because Pd is younger, or less popular, or just that it hasn't accepted many externs into the mainline (as Csound has ravenously), but unlike Max/MSP or even Csound, Pd has very few effects you can realize without knowing *exactly* how the DSP behind them works. FFT is about the highest-level thing, and even that has the bare minimum of automation. Ditto with the user-friendly filters. I don't feel like I'm even learning Pd anymore, so much as learning DSP. If I completely understand how some effect is created, it's no trick to realize it in Pd.
-Chuckk