The week in (creative) review
Week 3 of the newsletter! This is about as far as I assumed this little creative exercise would go, but truth be told, I’m absolutely loving the weekly deliverable-by-deadline structure this had added to my life. I’ve often (literally always) avoided self-imposed deadlines in the past, even knowing that due-by dates are the only way I’ve ever been able to hold myself accountable for getting things done.
A designer on designing
This past week was, regarding the development of my weekly M4L patch, a tough one: Max, and really programming in general, trades trudging through low-level code for optimized performance, better efficiency, and overall a higher degree of creative agency. There are some absolute marvels of audio programming prowess that really, really don’t feel like they’re made in Max (treading on thin ice here, buying into the whole “this feels like it was made with [software]’s default assets and is therefore lazy and uncreative" paradigm, but it’s a constant spectre over my own work). Nearly all of these projects come with a litany of bespoke UI and brilliant, novel approaches to getting sound out of your laptop. Just look at this:
Mine don’t. It takes a lot out of me to even come up with a meaningful color pallette for my devices, let alone figure out what the mandatory Gumroad screenshots should look like. For someone who went to design school, I can’t stand actually designing how my little machines should look, how the sliders should behave, how visuals correlate to timbral outputs. Maybe this is why I love generative music so much: you can obsess over the tiny details as much as you want, but the final product always embodies a sort of “let go and let God” approach (God usually being a neat little algorithm or box of chance-based operations).
Anyways! Part of this whole creative exercise in letting go and letting God involves me challenging my own notions of quality and individuality and instead emphasizes getting products and code out the door. I don’t derive a particularly meaningful amount of meaning from making neat little UIs, but I find a massive amount of fulfllment in actually getting my gadgets into the hands of folks like you.
So, onto the good part!
live.floop
live.floop is a looper, audio mangler, glitch machine, wavetable synth, and all-around multitool for getting pre-recorded samples to sound very much so not like themselves. It’s inspired by flop, an incredible sample playback device included in the beloved Max package ppooll, where I spend a good deal of time troubleshooting tech issues over on its respective Discord server.
live.floop takes two distinct playback engines and uses a sort of digital tape-loop approach to make the most out of very few controls. You can play files in reverse, use external automation to relish in some bizarre file-readback artifacts, and even use it as a MIDI synthesizer (albiet with a very specific implementation, made specifically to reward exploration!). For extra tidbits on how to use it, you can tap the logo in the devices bottom-right corner to pull up a tiny help window detailing the general vibe. Give it a try and leave a review on the Gumroad if you like it!
So, what else?
On a more personal note: live.floop is the most algorithmically demanding device I’ve made so-far, and is 1. liable to breaking, and 2. a functioning prototype of a tape-loop-esque sample player I’ve been working on for a long, long time. I can’t imagine any other per-week devices coming close to the functionality of this specific device, and for that reason, I’ll probably be updating live.floop periodically to perfect it, if not re-releasing it when I’ve settled on a more robust algorithm. Of all the devices I’ve released so far, this one is by far the most personally and creatively daunting, and likewise the most fulfilling to see released. As always, send things you make with it my way, I truly live to hear what sort of things folks do with my little gadgets!