| Thanks for your further comments. More of my own comments...
>Your tutorial pdf provides an excellent "getting started guide" on a lot of
>these details. Richard's material on designing instruments is essential, and
>very readable. Maybe I'm getting frustrated needlessly because the material
>I'm looking for is kind of scattered hither and yon.
It is. Perhaps I could bring some of Richard's material, at the least the beginning of it, into my tutorial.
>Michael Gogins wrote:
>>
>> I think it would be wise to focus on what Csound can do, for "newbies,"
>> that
>> they can't get done with other software, or can't get done as easily or as
>> well. And I don't think straightforward synthesis is it, although I
>> personally feel that there are a lot of Csound patches that give the best
>> commercial synthesizers a run for their money. I think, rather, that score
>> generation and the time/frequency analysis/resynthesis stuff that you can
>> do
>> with the pvs opcodes are definitely places where you just get lost with
>> commercial and popular software. Another advantage might be the ability to
>> build your own physical modeling instruments, a la Tassman.
>>
>> Please let us know your own thoughts on what particular features of Csound
>> might be appealing to your audience.
>>
>
>Well, in the draft of the intro to the article, I'm suggesting several
>things that may interest people. Perhaps you can suggest more. I've
>mentioned algorithmic composition (though I suppose I need to write a
>sidebar explaining what that is!), microtonal tunings, learning about DSP,
>doing advanced synthesis on an old, slow computer or without spending any
>money, and so forth.
Learning about DSP, yes. Microtonal tunings, definitely. Not spending any money... there is competition: free trackers are better for backbeat based music, free Pure Data is arguably better for realtime performance and working with video.
Advanced synthesis, definitely, but this is a huge field and needs to be qualified...
>I've also tried to qualify the discussion by saying, in essence, "If you
>just want to launch your DAW and write a pop song, Csound is probably not
>your best choice."
Yes, I think that needs to be clear. Csound is not going to save anybody any time. What it is going to do is make it possible to do things that are not possible with other software. Also, in my experience, you CAN get Csound to sound better doing regular synthesis -- but it takes a lot of tweaking, the engineers who created the commercial software and patches have already done a lot of very educated tweaking.
>> I hope that you have been able to find stimulating example pieces, or
>> instruments, that suggest some possibilities. If so, what are some of
>> them?
>> If not, please let us know.
>
>Nothing leaps to mind, but I still need to do a lot of digging to try to
>find things. I'm not saying it's not there, just that I haven't found it
>yet. I've listened to a few of the podcast tracks from Dr. B's students, and
>they're good, but nothing was so memorable that I can recall it a week
>later, I'm sorry to admit.
Kim Cascone... Brian Transeau, first track on This Binary Universe... Richard Karpen... I think some of Eric Lyon's earlier CDs like Retirement Fund. Steven Yi has a few pieces done with blue and rendered with Csound that I think are pretty good.
Regards,
Mike
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