The Water Street Project Week 5: Video Footage, New Content, and a Max Patch Disaster
This week, I worked on a couple small content projects, and worked with my band to prepare for an upcoming songwriting retreat, where we hope to finish some new songs that can be used as part of the new content for my project.
I also broke my Max patch.
But then again, nothing good ever came easy!
After two meetings with Dr. Nakra, I continued experimenting with my previous Max patch to try and get the chords to respond to an MP3 of one of the songs I plan to perform in May. The result was honestly catastrophic. The patch accidentally sent incorrect cues for certain chords as the audio file played. Picture musical fireworks accidentally being set off left and right without any control in your software.
Not wanting to be bested by the computer, I tried to narrow down my problem. The conclusion that I have come to is that since some of my chords have common tones (meaning that some chords share similar notes), when one or two of those notes is detected at a high rate, Max mistakenly believes that the parameters of both chords are fulfilled. Subsequently, Max sends two bangs out instead of one to the board, causing two lights to be lit simultaneously and unintentionally.
For example, the verse of my song “Colors” has the chords E minor, C Major, and G Major. Below are the notes that make up each chord:
E minor: E, G, B
C Major: C, E, G
G Major: G, B, D
As you can see, each chord in this group alone has at least one note in common with another chord. Chords that have 2 notes in common become much more difficult to differentiate, because they only have one note in their triad that sets them apart from the other chord.
I think the best way to counter this problem would be to have the piece playing and test the parameters until they respond more accurately to the music. This will be a more time-consuming, detail-oriented process, but it is necessary to create a catered patch for each song if it ultimately reduces the error rate.
Content:
The first big update this week is that we now have a clearer idea of the album art for our music release, which will be great content for both our website and our social media pages:
The only revision I would suggest to this album would be to stylize the text a bit further so that it looks more similar to handwriting.
Next, I created a short video outro in After Effects that we can re-use for YouTube videos, and link to other content on YouTube or our website:
We also shot some footage from a recent gig this past weekend that will hopefully be making its way onto our media pages shortly. I have also scheduled a future meeting with the band to discuss an itinerary for our songwriting retreat. We would ideally like to finish 2–3 songs that can then be recorded in our own studio, and supplement it with videos and photos taken during the retreat.
My next course of action is to continue fixing the Max patch, and work more on website updates. As we release new music and reach out to places about performances, we will have a more pressing need for an updated, clean website to direct venue booking agents to.
Check back in next week for more updates!
