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did some fuguemachine patterns while waiting for laurie's dr appt. This might be something I can work with
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In an attempt to try to do something from first principles in touchdesigner rather than following someone else's already working directions, I tried to add color mapping to change yesterday's visualization to use a color spectrum (red for low frequency … green … blue for high frequency along the axis of the visualization), but am stumped on how to do it (I now have a vague idea, but it would require completely reworking the geometry related operators to use instancing?). Managed to drive the color spectrum ramp by the timeline so it cycles through colors, but i wanted it to at least be reactive to the audio. This is closer to what I intended: it finds the dominant frequency of the audio and chooses the color for the whole thing based on that. Not what I originally intended, but I guess better than nothing.
This is going to be hard to master based only on low level docs and youtube tutorials that may or may not demonstrate a specific technique (very time consuming). May have to bite the bullet and sit through some basic "classroom" style tutorials. But clearly this is going to be a time sink and there are only so many hours in the day - need to balance playing with visuals vs. making music…
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I've been struggling with trying to get started with touchdesigner now for over a week - everything I've tried has failed - usually bringing my laptop to its knees and producing crackly/distorted audio. Today I found Matthew Ragan's examples and was able to get this audio-reactive visualization running and fed yesterday's music excerpt into it.
This gives me hope that I can make this work in a more general way and ought to devote some brain cells to learning how to abuse/tweak it. First step was to reproduce the demo component by component in a new project to ensure I more or less understand what's going on and that there is no hidden config I'm not aware of. It works…
This reminds me a lot of modular synthesis. Same sort of conceptual framework (simple components that take inputs and produce outputs and can be modulated by other signals) with very little constraint on how to connect things up. And the corresponding lack of guardrails and ease of boxing yourself into a corner you can't find a way out of…
Strangely, I'm growing to like this music more after listening to it in what should have been an annoying loop while farting around with these graphics. Go figure :)
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Following @Vin's lead again - axe the super random bassy thing and do a bit (probably not enough - maybe this is a place to open the sequence filters) of a buildup via the bass pattern and drums. Copy/pasted the final bass thingee, but if I decide to keep this will rework this to not repeat. I can sort of see this continuing on for a while with a more lazy quarter note bass semi-random "melody". I'm starting to grow weary of this – it's turning into a style I just don't really connect with, but I like it enough to want to "finish" it properly. Will muddle through…
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Try a modulation to F after the bass doodle and add the delayed square sequence back. Then back to C. Might work - need to sleep on it. Added a morphed variant of the wobbly bass pattern after the modulation. I can't decide if I like the "doesn't quite sound like a melody" randomness of these bass inserts or if I hate them :)
Adds a wee bit of distortion to the synth drums at @Vin's suggestion - I like it! While I was at it, added some delay on the drums and increase it as the track progresses - just can't help myself.
Recorded the scenes off to linear tracks. Had to restart Logic twice before the tracks would play properly (two were "greyed out" and silent (yet not explicitly muted)). Reopening the project got things back to normal. Now to get more serious about adjusting the arrangement.
Adds a new track with a more square wavy synth and 1/8 note delays at about halfway point. But that's getting a little cluttered and doesn't really fit the base sequence. Will probably remove it or at very least use more sparingly. And do i need to modulate to a new key? or just let this be repetitious? Would sampled drums sound better than these synthetic drums?
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Started to manually move loops into linear tracks – Yuck! Very time consuming - and perhaps have hit yet another Logic bug: dragging a loop named B and the resulting pattern copied to the track is E. Too many other things to do today so not bothering to even record the resulting mess. Might need to go back to the "record the loop scene 'performance' to tracks" and then slice them up so I can edit/rearrange – that seemed time consuming, but maybe less time consuming than what I thought would be straightforward.
