My second attempt at a Disquiet Junto project. I had to sit out last week’s junto as that called for a ‘musical diary’ using work from throughout the year, and I’ve only been doing this again since June. Embarrassing, that. Fortunately, there’s no pressure, so I’ll just do it as I can. So, for this week:

Project parameters are here. We were asked to take samples from three specific songs published under the Bump Foot netlabel (link saved for later reference). I won’t go into process details here, it’s all over at the SoundCloud site. It was good to jump into Ableton again. I hadn’t really touched it since 2007 (I’m still using v5.2).

In other news, I’ve been playing around with Pure Data in the background for a few weeks now. I’ve looked into the Max/AudioMulch/Pd way of doing things for over a year, and decided to just go with the free option for now. I’m currently struggling with how to best draw mathematical expressions in Pd, it’s not (yet) intuitive to me how Pd does it. There’s an ‘expression’ object, but its use is discouraged for most cases for reasons I don’t yet understand. So you end up drawing ‘math tree networks’ with individual operators to get the result you want.

But it’s been fun to play with oscillators and such again. Meanwhile, through a comedy of Christmas errors, we ended up with an ‘extra’ USB drawing tablet in the house. Before sending it back, I decided to hook it up to my machine, and quickly found that it was perfect for use with Pd. So I’m keeping it.

New year in a little under 10 hours. Good luck to us all.