Approaching the Tutorials
Does anyone have any tips on the best mindset with which to approach the Max / MSP / Jitter tutorials? I've fallen out of the tutorials in the past and am resolved to make it through all of them this time to (hopefully) finally get a solid grasp of the basics of M / M / J. That said, I'm often feeling that while I can now follow patches and understand signal flow and various objects and such, some concepts are a bit harder for me and I eventually just have move on from them and likely come back to them when I might actually want to use them my own projects. (The FFT stuff has been most difficult so far, which is what I just finished, as has some of the more complicated math.)
My sense is that if I can make it through all three groups of tutorials I'll have a solid base on which I can really start learning everything through building my own projects, which I've been doing my best to hold off on because (again) I've gotten distracted and pulled away from the tutorials and subsequently from M / M / J in the past. Does this seem like a reasonable way to approach learning the program? Is there anything else I should be doing as I work through the tutorials to help sediment what I'm learning (exercises / early stage projects / etc.)? For context, my lofty goal is to (eventually) use the system to try to build interactive multimedia art installations, but I also make electronic music and am very much interested in generative sequencing, instrument design, etc.
To be clear I'm really getting a good sense of all what all the objects I'm learning about do, signal / audio flows, and the overall logic of the system, which I'm really appreciating--this is by far the most I've ever understood Max / MSP / Jitter. I just want to make sure I'm using my early time with the program to the fullest. Any advice would be much appreciated, even if it's just that I'm doing what I should be doing and that I should chill out, haha.
each person will have a different idea... mine was to go in order Max, then MSP then Jitter tutorials, along with that i supplemented them with general knowledge from various texts like, The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads, Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance by Charles Dodge and Thomas Jerse, Musimathics by Gareth Loy(both vol. 1 and 2), The Theory and Technique Of Electronic Music by Miller Puckette, and many others(like The SuperCollider Book, The CSound Book, and this one: https://cycling74.com/forums/ann-a-new-book-on-maxmsp-5-and-sound-design by Alessandro Cipriani and Maurizio Giri, as well as some more advanced topics from Eric Lyon's book: https://cycling74.com/articles/an-interview-with-eric-lyon ), in addition, learned quite a bit from watching youtube channels like dude387:
https://www.youtube.com/user/dude837/videos
(by world famous rockstar and co-creator of 'Nestup', Sam Tarakajian),
and for Jitter, Amazing Max Stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/c/AmazingMaxStuff/videos
(by Jitter samurai legend, Federico Foderaro)
also ones by Chris Vik:
https://chrisvik.com/category/max/tutorial/
and so many others like Sabina Covarrubias, she also offers online courses, but i learned quite a bit observing the vids and checking her stuff out on the facebook groups(there are several, i'm no longer on fb, but if you are, you could just join them all and you'll learn quite a bit too):
https://www.youtube.com/c/SabinaCovarrubiasComposer/videos
Sem Schreuder:
https://www.youtube.com/user/shimlaDnB/videos
Michele Zaccagnini:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMQVkLE-bKdA7cycXECtCQ/videos
and many many others that i don't have time to find now, ok no wait... must take time for just two more very very important, ok wait, no three, no wait, FOUR more VERY important experts:
Tadej Droljc, Timo Hoogland, Rodrigo Constanzo, and Alex Harker
(but these last four have things you can learn from scattered all about the internetz so i'd recommend just searching them out further to find their websites, their previous works, papers they've done, and you can also find them(to some extent or another), in the facebook group, the slack channel, and the discord server...)
in any case, if you grow tired, sometimes you just need to complement your education with hands-on work and watching how others have patched/coded(for that i recommend chilling out to some of the youtube channels on a playlist or something, and go hang on the Slack channel, and of course here(but the search on this site is terrible so i'd recommend using google to search this site specifically... although you can also search for forum topics straight from within Max app's search, too, i've actually had more luck with that search... ok i'm digressing)...)
i admit to being a not-so-savvy ignoramus in regards to all things earthly,
just a passing observer and admirer 🙇♂️👽, so hopefully others will chime in with more,
but in the meantime, hope it helps 🍻
This is all so helpful! Thanks Raja. I'm approaching it in a similar way (going through the tutorials in order) but I've been really trying to grind my way through them to get the foundational knowledge before fiddling too much and getting off track. I'm definitely going to check out those books you mentioned to help supplement my knowledge as I go, though!
Wow, R∆J∆ (or should we call you “Space Captain” as in the song?), what a thorough answer! Thank you - I’ll be referring back to this post when I’m ready for another crack at Jitter. Cheers!