Content You Need: A c74connect Patching Series

The Content You Need series of postings that you see here from time to time usually mention recent and useful additions to Max's Package Manager that you can install and use to extend Max's functionality into new areas or provide a focused collection of tools to make your patching life easier and more efficient. This time out, there’s something a little different: A pointer to a weekly series of Max 8.3-based patches hosted on our c74connect Instagram page.

The arrival of Max 8.3's new features and externals has been inspiring for a lot of users (take a look at Garth Paine and Darwin Grosse's Max 8.3 patching series or these nifty patches from ZeroPoint Zero's youtube channel as examples), including those of us here at Cycling '74. Like many of you, we started talking amongst ourselves about the new features and wondering what we could do with them. The result was a weekly get-together by a number of us to patch together and share ideas (Imagine one of Cycling ‘74’s Patch a Day series, but with several of your friends at Cycling ’74 working together and exchanging ideas).

What emerged from our time together was a collection of around twenty patches with the kind of exploration that many of you do — the sort of experiments that might precede a real project or provide the kernel of an idea: We wound up creating patches that said, "Hmmm… this is doing something interesting. Maybe there's something here...."

We’d like to share those results with you as a weekly series on the c74connect Instagram page (some of which you’ll find online right now, with others to come).

We hope that our series of early ideas and quick tricks will help you approach a new set of tools and provide simple starting places for exploration and inspiration (even if it's just hitting the quickrecord and cranking number boxes). After all, that's where a lot of the fun is in Max.

Happy patching!