dorian190

For an assignment I've composed a house track that will hopefully allow the user to choose what each track sounds like.

Basically, I'm wanting the patch to present the user with 2 options for each track in the song as each track/instrument is introduced throughout the progression of the song. For example the first choice is whether the kick is soft and heavy on the low end or more brittle with a faster attack. Then during bar 4-8, the user would choose whether which pad synth will be featured (either ambient/airy/noisy or punchy, less distant, heavy use of saw oscillator); then from bar 8-16 they would decide whether a piano or a synth (with similar adsr to piano) is played over the top. Then whether an acoustic or electric guitar is featured in the middle 8. So on and so forth...

This will continue until all the tracks have been chosen. For this part I consider myself familiar enough with Max to do without much difficulty but I'd love to hear any suggestions as to how I could make the format better/more interesting/more accessible and if theres some way of going about this that I haven't thought of (At the moment I'm just going to have all the wavs loaded into sfplays and played simultaneously and as the choices are made, the selected tracks are unmuted.

After all the tracks have been chosen I want to, with the use of something like a vocoder, allow the user to make a sound into a microphone (a guitar/their voice/whistle) which will then be sampled automatically, pitch shifted and played automatically over the last section of the song (think loading a .wav into a software sampler like Kontakt and then playing it at different pitches with the keys). Is this feasible? If not, is there something similar that might be?

I'm guessing I'd need a way of getting the patch to trim the recording so that the playback/sampling starts at the beginning of the sound so that it plays in time with the song. Is there a way of getting Max to somehow roughly find the beginning of a sound (maybe getting it to play the recording from the point that it's waveform exceeds a certain dB?)

The premise of the composition is to make a song that lets the listener (sort of) take part in the composition of the track through simple choices, negating any need for musical skill.

Here are some of the pitfalls I'm worried I might encounter:

- Could there be any problems with tracks going out of sync if 20 or so wavs are played simultaneously?

- I have a high end PC with an external audio interface, but is there a chance that playing this many wavs at the same time might be too much?

- I'm making sure each track operates as independently as possible (all effects are inserts, sidechaining is done with a prefade kick etc), could the mix end up sounding different if I export each track separately and play them through Max?

I'm terrified to commit to this idea because of the time constraints; really don't to find out halfway through that the idea is simply impossible!

Not sure how well I've explained this and I'll be refreshing this post pretty much every 20 minutes, so if you have any questions I'm happy to answer asap.

Any help/ideas/warnings are really appreciated

-------------------------------------
ADDITIONAL, MORE COMPLEX PART

I'm guessing I'd need a way of getting the patch to trim the recording so that the playback/sampling starts at the beginning of the sound so that it plays in time with the song. Is there a way of getting Max to somehow roughly find the beginning of a sound (maybe getting it to play the recording from the point that it's waveform exceeds a certain dB?)
-------------------------------------
The premise of the composition is to make a song that lets the listener (sort of) take part in the composition of the track through simple choices, negating any need for musical skill.

Here are some of the pitfalls I'm worried I might encounter:
- Could there be any problems with tracks going out of sync if 20 or so wavs are played simultaneously?
- I have a high end PC with an external audio interface, but is there a chance that playing this many wavs at the same time might be too much?
- I'm making sure each track operates as independently as possible (all effects are inserts, sidechaining is done with a prefade kick etc), could the mix end up sounding different if I export each track separately and play them through Max?

wrote-a-piece-of-music-where-each-track-has-2-instrumenttimbral-options-for-max

Did you end up doing this? id really like to see it

Wrote a piece of music where each track has 2 instrument/timbral options for Max