Max5 Patch - Manipulating Wave Forms With AKAI LPD8

This is a Max5 patch that I've made in class to use with my Akai LPD8 midi controller. I have two identical patches running side by side each with two different wave form reading. The first is an extract from one of my own compositions; a short ambient piece making the most of electronic effects over a piano section. The second wave form is a continuous fast drum loop. I use two of the eight pads on my LPD8 to switch each sample on or off, I am then using the ctlin knobs what happens with the waveforms; 1 scrolls through the wave form, the 2nd second scrolls so we can loop a smaller section, the 3rd controls the speed at which we play back from 1 to 15 to give the effect of a higher pitch and the 4th knob -1 to -15 to give us lower pitches. As there is 8 pads the first row controls the drum sample patch and the second row controls the ambient extract. Playing these two pieces together and manipulating smaller sections at different speeds and times creates a whole new original piece of music.



To Download the patch and samples used Click Here

Hide and Seek

I was on youtube earlier watching videos of a singer/songwriter that I am really into named Imogen Heap, when I stumbled across this video of her playing her song "Hide and Seek" live. The song itself is a very minimal effort relying heavily on vocals and lyrical content.The vocals on the studio edition are rather manipulated in an electronic way, the way she captures this essence in the live performance below, I found very intriguing. As opposed to using a simple vocoder effect, she uses her keyboard to electronically produce her own almost vocoder sounding harmonies. To put it simpler, she sings into the microphone and plays the underlying harmonic melody on keyboard but as opposed to having a piano sound, it manipulates the audio input from the microphone. From roughly 4 minutes onwards we can hear that she produces a loop of the harmony she had just sang to sing over.

I'd quite like to experiment in making a simple patch in max5 to produce an electronically manipulated version of whatever audio signal is being input into a microphone, enabling us to play piano chords to manipulate the vocal harmony to a different melody and also then experiment with having a record and stop button so we can save a section as we go and be able to trigger the saved sample later in the same track.