On 2/20/07, Derek Holzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Jared, > > for what it's worth, I've been working with PD for years and I still > can't read most other people's patches ;-) > > Everybody has their own style, their own "handwriting", and some are > more readable than others. Diving right into somebody's finished patch > is pretty difficult for an experienced user, and almost impossible for a > beginner, I'd say! If you were trying to learn German, would you start > by reading Goethe?
Imagine learning English by reading Shakespeare. I tried German with Kafka, and, probably for the same reason I like reading him so much in English, it was impossible. Such long sentences. James Joyce learned Italian from Dante Alighieri, and supposedly caused a stir when he went to Italy talking like a medieval person. I obtained a book of Petrarch sonnets a few years ago, and half the words were nowhere in any Italian dictionary. > I learned PD by reproducing things which I understood already in stages, > such as going from a quad-panner, a mixer, a sampler and a > delay-network, to complex feedback-FM, a granular synthesizer and an > algorithmic sequencer...etc etc. I've found it impossible to make a granular synthesizer with Pd. I thought I tried everything. I've gone from Csound to Pd, and back to Csound, and found I understood Csound so much better for it. Vanilla Pd is so low-level it's like working on the microsound level the whole time. I don't know if it's because Pd is younger, or less popular, or just that it hasn't accepted many externs into the mainline (as Csound has ravenously), but unlike Max/MSP or even Csound, Pd has very few effects you can realize without knowing *exactly* how the DSP behind them works. FFT is about the highest-level thing, and even that has the bare minimum of automation. Ditto with the user-friendly filters. I don't feel like I'm even learning Pd anymore, so much as learning DSP. If I completely understand how some effect is created, it's no trick to realize it in Pd. -Chuckk -- http://www.badmuthahubbard.com _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
