Boredom is my friend

I won't practice. I've tried, really I have. I say "this time will be different", and I "commit" to an hour a day, or a half-hour a day. I pick up my beginner's level books (Mel Bay for guitar, or Alfred's Adult for keyboard), and hop to it. Sometimes I make it a month, once or twice I've made it two or three. More often than not, I make it a week. This has happened at least once or twice a year for my adult life.

I just won't practice.

But the fact that I come back to it year after year tells me that something is going on between me and music. I can't just put it away. Something in me wants to make music.

Without getting too self-psychoanalytical, I think I try to bite off way too much at a time, and I think I've missed the mark in the past with my efforts. Rather than "learning to play an instrument", followed at some point by "then creating with that instrument", I'm instead going to just get my hands on the instrument (primarily keyboard, but perhaps guitar as well) very regularly. Hopefully daily, but if not quite that often, oh well. Make something up. Play around. No time limits, just make sure I'm there.

And then, I'm gonna get bored.

But it'll be a flavor of boredom that will make me curious about what else I can do. I will have run out of things that I know how to do, and will go looking for more. What little bit can I learn that'll make it a little bit interesting again. (Which will be a different kind of boring than the old, familiar "oh great, I've got to do scales AGAIN", which after a week or three, makes me want to scream.)

This happened this morning. Many years ago, a keyboard teacher taught me a blues scale. Pretty darn hard to play those 5 or 6 notes and make them sound bad. So for the past couple of weeks, I've been sitting down and playing the blues scale up and down the keyboard. And it's gotten pretty boring. So this morning, I did it again, only trying to figure out what else to put in there. I didn't come up with anything worth writing down, but I started jumping around a bit more, and threw in a few extra notes, just to see what they'd sound like. (Mostly, like crap, but here and there, I had a few happy mistakes.) So now I'm off and running again.

And in a few more days, when I get bored again, I might just try modulating from C to F or G, and see what that sounds like for a week or two.

Anyway, the point is to use my boredom as a wedge to get my brain to loosen up and have fun. To me, playing other peoples' music isn't that fun; making my own looks like a blast, and on those rare moments when I make up something interesting, it *IS* a blast.

So yes, boredom, or at least the right kind of boredom, is my friend. A gentle force to nudge me onward, and to remind me that I should be having fun. Because without that fun, I'll be done with this in a week.

PD's Help System

In the process of learning PD (in particular, trying to understand ex. 3.16), I've been poking around the PD help system. Curiously enough, the help "pages" are actually patches in their own right. In my case, I went looking at the help page for [stripnote], (Help, Browser, 5. Reference, Stripnote), and the window that comes up lets you play with a [stripnote] object. Click on the note-on message (the message box on the right), and you get print output on the console window; click on the note-off message (on the left), and you get nothing.

The other thing that's cool about the whole visual programming paradigm is being able to connect a number box to one of the outputs of, say, [notein], and watch what's happening as you play keys on a keyboard. I believe you can also get a graph of a waveform displayed in a control every so often, but I'm still figuring out how to do that.

Pretty neat that PD lends itself to such play.

TTEM's Example 3.16

(We now resume this blog, after a few days out with a cold.)

This morning, I got example 3.16 (from TTEM) wired up and working. (I believe the examples from TTEM and the PD examples (i.e. that ship with the program) are one and the same, so I wouldn't have had to wire it up myself, except I wanted to get my hands dirty putting something together.)

The first thing I noticed was how nicely expressive it is, compared to my beginner's "notein->mtof->osc~" patch I had been using. 3.16 gives a little buzz at higher key velocities, has a similar volume at the higher pitches as it does at the lower, and fades quite satisfyingly when you lift the key.

Now I just need to go through the text and understand better how it works. I get most of the top two-thirds, but get a little fuzzy below the phasor~, with all the *~'s and the cos~'s and all. Sounds like my next mini-task, (before I figure out how to wire 3.16 up for polyphony).

Theory and Technique of Electronic Music

Having gotten PD to hear MIDI from my keyboard and play my very simple patch, my next thought was to figure out how to get polyphony out of PD.

PD is a pretty low-level softsynth. It gives you the basics, like oscillators and D/A converters, but beyond that, you wire them up to suit your needs. Kinda like being given a box of tubes, resistors and capacitors and being told you can build your own stereo. Hence my need to "figure out polyphony". I'm doing so because a) once you figure it out (and it doesn't look to be that hard, really), you can do pretty much anything you want, and b) I'm a geek.

So my next step was to dust off (figuratively speaking) my copy of TTEM, known also as "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music", by Miller Puckette. On the one hand, TTEM is (if not "over my head") a lot of complex stuff about synthesizing sound, but wrapped around the math and theory is explanations of how to do stuff with PD. Like sampling, reverb and polyphony.

Having read TTEM pretty much cover to cover a year or so ago, I'm just skimming over things, and heading for the practical, and this morning, I stopped and got halfway through understanding example 3.16, which looks like a more complete MIDI patch.

Puredata and MIDI

I fired up Puredata (PD) yesterday, pulled up my first (and only) attempt at putting a MIDI-controlled patch together, and for some reason, it wasn't hearing MIDI. So this morning, I troubleshot it.

Turns out that under the Media menu, PD remembered that I use OSS for sound output, and that I had default-MIDI selected, but didn't remember the MIDI devices that I was using, so when I pulled up the "MIDI settings..." dialog, it showed "none" for the input and output device. First time through, I tried switching to ALSA and back, and I seem to recall somehow that worked, but as I write this up, it leaves the MIDI devices blank. Anyway, when I set them both to "OSS MIDI device #1", it works just fine.

Back to Music

Time for another run at creating music. I play keyboards barely at a beginner's level, guitar barely at a beginner's level, and have a tolerable understanding of what they teach in the first two semesters of college level theory. I've wanted to do something with all that, but for various reasons, get discouraged in short order and put it back on the shelf.

I have a decade-old Takamine acoustic guitar, a several-year-old Casio keyboard, and MIDI cables connecting the keyboard to my Linux box. I have Rosegarden and PureData/PD installed (among other things like Hydrogen and I think FreeBase), but have done very little with any of them.

So anyway, this blog will chronicle what I'm doing. I hope to use it to share what I'm learning, in theory, gear, software and the mental processes that I'm using to make beautiful (ahem) music.