I could never have fun with Max/MSP. I would really, really love to.
Hi!
I am a sound artist / composer. I work largely in the musical theatre domain, and most electro-acoustic compositions I did were done in a DAW, I used Max only twice in performance so far.
Frankly, I have an immense insecurity regarding my technical knowledge and intelligence. Max is representative of this to me. I first got in touch with it in 2018. 8 years later, I still find myself having absolutely no idea about it. I still can't understand how to make a sequencer, how to use FFT, how to analyse a video with jit. objects, how to form different logics, what kinds of logic are available even. Initially, I can't do quite literally anything alone with Max, I always need help.
Recently I did a performance in which I had to use Max, as it required Jitter. I had to ask a specialist friend, and I feel he pretty much did 90% of the coding. It feels terrible that I have to rely on my peers and consume their time and energy.
I'm aware of the autonomy it provides compared to a DAW. But every time I open this wretched program, I feel miserable, stupid and insecure, as I simply can't understand anything, can't feel anything intuitive or musical. After 8 years, with especially last 3 years trying to tackle this thing, I am incredibly fatigued now, as it feels like it's speaking to me how absolutely stupid and incapable I really am. How many tutorials have I looked into, how many documents have I read and so on, just... torments me so much honestly.
I really wanted to get help from a Max community, as I assumed there will be users who felt like me, eventually overcoming this insecurity and finally enjoy exploring Max. How would you approach Max in a state like this? How might one enjoy this?
After years of being too broke to buy any gear, I did enough gigs to finally purchase a nice touch plate based controller. I wondered if this will enable me to explore an 'intuitive, musical' element of Max, where I can map physical gestures. Do you think a controller like this can change my perception of Max?
How did you got into Max? What do you enjoy doing in it? What are some of the advices you would give to a person like me?
Thank you so much for reading!