Considering Max as a pedalboard replacement
I'd love to replace my guitar (well, bass, but whatever...) pedalboard with Max, but I'm not sure how practical it would be for the effects I use the most, so I wonder if any of you could advise me?
Here's the stuff I make a lot of use of. Bear in mind all of these effects would have to be real-time. Latency would really ruin things for me.
Pitch shifting: Mostly for octave up Whammy-style effects. I found the elastic~ patch which looks like it might be good enough but it says it's Max 5 and I don't know if it'll still work in 7? I also saw there is a native real-time pitch shifting patch in 7 but I couldn't find any demo of it - would it do?
Pitch vibrato: I guess the same patch would manage this?
Sample rate reduction: Would degrade~ work as a real-time sample-rate reducer?
Analogue octave divider: Again I appreciate that I won't be doing any actual 'analogue' signal processing in Max but I would need to get something sounding like a Boss OC-2.
Fuzz: I can imagine a good fuzz is quite hard to do. This isn't a total deal-breaker though, I don't mind using other, digital ways of adding harmonics.
From my previous experiments with Max I'm happy that it will do all the filtering and delay stuff I like, so it's just those things really that I'm not sure about. Any advise would be very much appreciated.
- Kev
Max can do most of what you want and plenty more, but you're right about distortion - I've never come across anything really good in any digital software.
Hi
I can't offer specific advice on your choices of FX, but this is where I would start (updated for Max 6):
And these topics may be of related interest:
If I had more time, I could hack together the pitch effects, in Gen maybe; fuzz, again not too sure about. But if you're familiar with delays and filtering in Max, this shouldn't be a conceptual challenge for you
HTH
Brendan
Thanks guys, I think I'll get a year's license and see where I get with it. I enjoyed demoing v6 last year and I'm actually a Javascript developer so I'm looking forward to doing something more interesting than my day job with Javascript. :)
I'll definitely check out that routing system idea. First job is being able to make a handful of key sounds though. Mustn't get distracted. ;)
@KEVNULL sounds great
please share your insights with us
I might get into a max guitar pedalboard myself
@kevnull, all the fx you mention are perfectly possible and even easy to build in max, and a lot more. anything with distortion / saturation (i.e. everything you mention) you just have to accept the high cpu load to do it properly.
your problem is not the fx, it is latency. there is no single computer hardware / software + interface system on the planet where latency is musically acceptable. never has been. you'll find modern computer performers just live with it. so that is the trade off you need to decide for or against. i can get about 6 ms if i try really hard, and i find it impossible to play with. others do better though. but if you are used to analogue, get ready for major disappointment.
hth.
Here's a whammy-style pitch shifter:
https://cycling74.com/forums/how-to-get-glitchy-whammy-pedal-style-pitch-shifting/
Degrade works well, but the bit crushing works in discreet steps. You can look at the lofi module in The Party Van, which uses a few different techniques (including bitwise manipulation). The other fx modules in there sound pretty good too:
http://www.rodrigoconstanzo.com/the-party-van
Hi,
I've been looking at the pitch shifting problem since my first post on Friday, reading various threads and looking at the efforts of others, trying out various objects and patches with some test audio files. No luck so far. :(
Your patch from the thread above is interesting. It sounds good at lower pitch variations but I need an octave really, and I'm getting some really odd (I mean, cool, but not useful to me for this purpose) artefacts, sounds like there's some ring modulation occurring.
It seems like all the hardware guys have got very good Whammy-style effects now (I'm currently using a Line 6 M9 for mine). I would've thought it would be well understood and easy to do. But apparently not. :)
Isn't there awesome real time pitch shifting/stretching in Max 7 now?
The first thing I tried was running some bass guitar audio into the new Max 7 pitchshift~ object, but I got some big warbles at certain intervals and the 'quality' param didn't seem to do anything. It's difficult to see any way to improve matters given that it only has two inputs - the signal to be processed and the factor of pitch shift.
Does changing vector sizes make a difference?
There's no parameter to control it.
I mean Max's vector sizes, I think this is now called Audio Status, used to be DSP status.
For my money, the add-overlap method used in that other thread sounds the closest to a physical whammy pedal (tracking artefacts and all). It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's a complex effect to do right.
I also think that most really high end algorithms are proprietary (eventide, or even the original whammy pedal type stuff).
If you're working with a bass that also complicates things, specifically latency, as most pitch shifters use pitch tracking as part of what they do (at least with the whammy-style 'time' based shifting), and because of the physics of lower frequencies, you have an inherent trade off between accuracy and latency.
Oh, Peter M posts a good 'stompbox octave pedal' sound in this thread:
https://cycling74.com/forums/how-to-make-an-octaver/
Yeah I'm used to dealing with latency problems from the lower octave of the bass, but I have to say I haven't had any massive problems with this when using commercial 'Whammy'-style effects. I should perhaps add that I've never used an actual Whammy pedal for this, instead I've used boxes from Line 6, EHX and Eventide, although the Line 6 model is supposedly based on the Whammy and that's the one I've used the longest now.
Thanks for the octaver examples. I'm pretty sure the OC-2 uses the method that Peter McCulloch describes in that thread, so I'll give that a try. I think this Whammy problem is going to keep me occupied for quite a while though. :/
That might be the, subtle, difference then. I find most of the whammy emulations to sound quite different. One of my fav bits of the whammy sound is that warbling/glitching stuff, which most of the other versions 'fix'.
I did a comparison video between the wh1 and wh4 a bunch of years ago. You can hear what I mean starting at 11:50 or so:
http://www.rodrigoconstanzo.com/whammy-comparison/
OK well after much experimentation, for now I'm going with Tristan Jehan's shifter~ object with the pitch derived from sigmund~'s output into mtof.
It sounds the most like the pitch shifter patch on my M9 - there aren't so many warbly intervals or frequency-shifter-like artefacts, and no granular processing hiccups. I haven't tried it with a live instrument input yet though (bit late here in the UK to be bothering the neighbours) so I don't know what the latency is going to be like. Fingers crossed.
Rodrigo I appreciate what you're saying about the Whammy's character and I know a lot of people are really fond of it, but I guess not having used one myself I have different expectations. And as a bass player primarily I really just need a smooth transition with a broad range of harmonics in the shifted note. Which is the main reason I rejected the Max 7 pitchshift~ object in the end - it was really thin sounding when shifted up an octave. I imagine it's much more useful for vocals.