I arrived at class and was glad to be told that we would be given time to make some final adjustments to our patches. I needed this, as there were still some sensitivity issues I wanted to fix.
When I opened my patch and connected Kinect, I was horrified to find that for some reason, everything had been reversed. Positive values were negative, up meant down, left meant right, etc...
I couldn't tell what hand was controlling what. Immediately I started working around this. I had to change the entire order of my samples, as well as move the scale tool to the ones that previously hadn't needed it. It took me twenty minutes, but I fixed it, and was relatively happy, until I realised that the movement I'd set to the high C was working the opposite way, and there was no way for me to fix it. I tried and tried, but nothing worked - it would only be triggered if I moved my left hand inside rather than outside of my body, which complicated things. To fix this, I simply changed the sensitivity of it, so that I didn't have to move quite so much.
The sensitivities of my various notes had changed too. For example, if I wanted to play my low C and Eb, in order to play the Eb, I'd have to play the C again because I couldn't desensitise the Kinect enough to stop the two from clipping. If I did, you'd have to crouch down and leap up to trigger the notes, which while fun, wasn't what I was after. If I had prepared my patch earlier, I would have loved to have just spent weeks adding little things into my patch, constantly adjusting it so that the parameters I'd set stayed constant. I'd have made it much more accessible, and easier to solo properly. I'd also have liked to have been able to sort some of the latency issues - sometimes if you moved too fast, Max wouldn't pick up your movement, or there would be a half second delay while playing certain samples, meaning playing in time became very difficult.
I did explain to Ross that the purpose of my patch was to have fun, and that he shouldn't expect a virtuoso performance. If anyone was able to make their solo sound like Dr. John I'd probably walk out in jealous disgust.
After making some final adjustments to my patch (those damn sensitivities...) I was ready to perform.
I started off by showing everyone how in control I was by playing all of my notes cleanly and without clipping. I had of course practiced this, and knew exactly where to position my hands so that the notes would play themselves. Unfortunately, as I played my final C, having made sure it all sounded so clean, Jordan played something on the computer next to me, and it sounded like my final note was connected to a bunch of other notes and noises. This frustrated me, as you can see on the video, but I knew that it was Minton, and not my oh so perfect patch that made the nose...
After demonstrating a brief solo to the class along to a slow blues backing track in C, I let others come up to have a shot, as per my original idea.
Steve, Ross (our lecturer) and Dean had a shot, and as I watched them, I suddenly felt very pleased; my original idea had been to create a patch where anyone could come up and solo over a blues backing track using just their hands; at first I thought the idea was too ambitious, but here I was watching them do what I'd envisioned from the start. I felt a real sense of accomplishment.
People seemed to really enjoy it, and everyone had fun. There were some minor niggles that I'd have liked to fix - the latency, for example, but I was very pleased with my end result. Ideally, I'd have liked it to have been much smoother - if I was able to make it so smooth that whoever was in control would be able to play along with a live blues band in time, playing a thought out solo rather than just random notes, that would have been fantastic.
Alas, this was my first time working with Max and with technology and music together. I am very pleased with the end result, and feel that I have gained a huge amount of experience and confidence from this module as a whole. I look forward to taking the Tech module again next year, where I aim to push myself and come up with something even better. Hopefully my breakthrough for it won't arrive so late in the year next time, meaning when I go to perform it, it will be mind blowing.
Though to be fair, to look back at the video, it is pretty mind blowing seeing people play a blues solo using just their hands. If I may say so myself.
VIDEO TO COME
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