> Step by step

3. Beginning the build

1 “We’ve got quite a lot of Comments at the moment, but we don’t really need them. Select them and delete them with the Backspace key. We’re now ready to get going. We’re going to literally insert our processor in between this signal flow. We’re going to build our processor from a combination of existing Max objects.” 2 “Press the N key to open up a Type box where you can simply type in the name of the object you want. We know we’re going to use a specific object for our effect – degrade~ – so if we begin to type in degrade, it auto-completes for us. Press Enter to build our degrade~ object.” 3 “Objects have inlets and outlets. The degrade~ object’s first inlet is the audio input, taking the audio signal from your DAW or another object. The second inlet is for a parameter, and this is what we’re going to use to control the settings of the degrade~. This one takes a float signal: it says sample rate ratio.” 4 “My last inlet, inlet 3, is again for a parameter, and this takes an ‘int’ or integer. This particular inlet is for the

resolution in bits, or bit depth. This object’s only got one outlet, and that’s the audio output. So we have an input for audio, an output for audio, and a number of inlets for different types of parameters, depending on the object.” 5 “These patch cords represent audio signals. We want to send our input into the Degrader, so we’re bringing our audio signal from Live through the plugin object and patching it into the degrade~. Take the left and right signals from Live and patch them into our degrade~, so we’re making a mono-to-stereo effect.” 6 “Now take the output signal and patch that into the plugout, and again, take the left channel into the left speaker, and a copy of the same audio signal into the right speaker, so it’s a mono-to-stereo processor. There’s not really going to be any stereo imaging involved in this – it’s a simple device.”