I wish I knew…
Hello dear Maxers,
I’m curious how different people have learned Max and what they have learned along the way…
What is it you wish you’d known before you went down that inevitable rabbit hole while patching?
What is it you wish you knew right now but don’t know how to get there?
Would you prefer more video tutorials? Tutorial patches? Books? E-books with embedded media? What media allows you to learn the most efficient?
For me, my rabbit holes have always been early abstractions. When I see something that looks like I might need it again I make an abstraction. And because I can’t help myself, I also make a help file… I have hundreds of abstractions doing everything you can think of.
Right now, I wish I knew GEN and RNBO better but because I have no project where they are crucial, I just don’t have the time to allocate to learning them properly.
I’ve used Max for over 2 decades now, have taught it at university, privately, used it for pieces, analysis, audio generation, video generation, and everything in between.
I wish I knew right from the beginning that:
#1-#9 refers to patchers arguments
[pattr] objects can be bound to attributes of objects with a scripting name (meaning you can get/set an object's attribute from anywhere just by using a [pattr])
[jit.time] is a thing
[jit.time.line] @start 0. @end 1. @interval 1234 as well
I just wish i had paid more attention to math when i was in highschool. I am solely to blame ofcourse for that but i'm sure that if the teacher (and material) would've been able to inspire me back then as much as it does now i would've gobbled it all up without objection
And right now i just wish i actually knew opengl and what hampers me into fully commiting is the lack of options to debug and vague errors. It's usually just a blackbox to me that either works or doesn't.
What helped me a lot with learning Gen for example was the ability to inspect a value at every stage in the patch by creating another outlet. Not seeing the expected result? ok, so what is the object higher up in the chain outputting? etc.
And yes, i would definitely like to see more video tutorials. They help me more than anything else