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…