Articles

Learning how to stutter (to good effect)

The arrival of Hail to the Thief, Radiohead's followup release to Kid A contained a nice surprise for us here at Cycling '74: we were mentioned in the "thanks to" section of the album notes.

Suddenly, we had a whole bunch of new people who'd never heard of MSP googling us, what with stage shots of the mysterious MSP stuff in action and gear-o-centric web articles with MSP patches on those laptop screens and everything. Things like that floating about in the interwebs shook loose all kinds of interest by the band’s legion of fans.

It was a little vexing for us at Cycling ’74, though – several Roman legions’ worth of bedsitter Radiohead fans downloaded the Max 5 demo, fired it up, were presented with the standard pristine white screen, and went crazy – "How was this supposed to make me sound like Radiohead?" they cried in frustration. Shout-outs from famous stars can be a mixed blessing.

That interest remains, enshrined in the occasional video demo of someone's version of it in action, as well as the ever-popular patch grovel.

My "look what I found on the Web" pointer for you this week follows in the train of this interest: a nice, straight-ahead tutorial on creating Jonny Greenwood's stutter-effect. It combines the kinds of insightful thinking that reverse engineering patches often provides with a great presentation of how to do it. Watch it below, and then write the guy a nice thank-you note.

by Gregory Taylor on October 6, 2015

Creative Commons License
mekayama's icon

This is very good patch.
And, I imported to Max For Live.

Xander Sijperda's icon

I'll have a try. Very nice thank you!

Anthony Marasco's icon

Hi Mekayama!

I remade your M4L patch as a Max 6 project, but I think I may have done something incorrect. After each stutter, when the signal coming into the number~ object drops to zero, I get a high pitched "squeak" sound. This does not happen when using your M4L version of the patch, and while I've compared my recreation and your original many times, I still can't get rid of this high pitched sound.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Would you be able to take a look at my patch and let me know if I'm doing something wrong? Thanks!

Isandro Ojeda-García's icon

Hey, a lot of clicks in this patch... why ?

Lorenzo Grilli's icon

Lets keep this thread alive!

👽'tW∆s ∆lienz👽's icon

some gen~ versions of stutter-engines if anyone likes to add to their repertoire:
https://cycling74.com/forums/sharing-is-for-asswipes-fart-noises-in-gen-aka-stutters-d
(please don't mind the title and silliness... haha: text is not my forté 😜😊😇)