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.