Hi,

Three questions

1. Does anyone know what command(s) I use to control a synth patch in Pure Data using the keyboard of my laptop?

2. Another thing I am wondering about is how I might control a synth with a piano. I have a midi to usb cable that I can connect from my laptop to the keyboard.

3. Are there any great synth patches available for download to experiment with?

thanks

i was just reading this thread,trying to get a way to play a synth patch(i'm a newbie).
when i saw hardoffs suggestion,so i dl the casiosynth(nice synth btw) but only manage to copy/paste the complex data of 'pd pianokeys',but couldn't figure out how to just copy the object?(is that called an object?

oh,i've just realised you have to be in edit mode to copy the objects.
thanks.

hi spacedad (nice name

what you need to do is open the casio.pd patch, turn edit mode on (ctrl E), and then click once on an area just above the [pd pianokeys] subpatch*

then, with your mouse still clicked down, move over the subpatch, and it will turn blue. ..unclick

you have now selected the subpatch and can do a ctrl-x or control c to cut or copy it.

ctrl-p will paste it in another patch or anywhere you want.

* quick explaination of objects, externals, abstractions, subpatches:

1. object : anything included in the basic pd distribution (miller vanilla) - examples = [+ ] , [f ] , [tabread] ...etc

2. externals : basically the same as objects, but written by people other than miller... these live in your "extra" folder.. examples = [gemhead] , [makesymbol] , [freeverb~]

3. abstraction : a patch that is saved somewhere on your hard disk to be used inside other patches. you can tell that it is not an object because if you click on it , it will open to show the pd patch inside

4. subpatch : anything that looks like this -> [pd blah-blah-blah] - basically it is a patch within a patch, hence "subpatch"

thanks!
i've just tried joining it onto pd_doc_3's classicsynth eg.but not worky.
that had a kinda stepseq thingy which doesn't seem to be connected(but obviously invisibly is!)i've a lot of learning to do,but discovering the examples in the docs was good today.
i still can't get my midi keyboard to work either,once i get some kind of playabilty understood i should be able to experiment with some of the examples,it's just not obvious.

Maybe CTRL-D is what you want. That duplicates anything that is selected.

Be careful when you copy subpatches that you don't copy items that must be unique,
you will see a warning in the console about things being multiply defined if that happens.

andy

thanks for the tips,
now i get,
'kee (x)...couldn't create.'
i thought i had it working but when i reloaded it,it didn't.hmm.

here's a better, newer version that doesn't need any abstractions:

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/pianokeys.pd

yay!thanks hardoff!

it's confused me,it now has 2 parts 'in' and 'out' how do i connect it to a synth?
cos the 's $0-transpose' and the 'outlets' don't have any connecting pins.

i was just googeling for pd help,when i came across obiwannabe's site.the six simple synths look like a good start to me.thanks for them.
i use synthedit (and i'm only new at that!)and pd is a bit different.

hi, i'm at an internet cafe　cos my computer went to nirvana at a gig last week...but the output of pianokeys is a list,,,,,so you can get the seperate parts by doing an [unpack] on the outlet data

just plug in a [print] object to find what data is coming out.

(internet cafe keyboards are hard to use...)

hi hardoff,sorry to hear about your puter.
i'm not sure i get it still,though i found obiwanabe's synth tutorials,which have been very good for me(only half way through the first one).
so maybe things will become clearer as i reach the end.
pd seems deeper than synthedit,are you familiar?

like this:

[pianokeys]
|
[print]

and then press some keys, and then look in the pd console window to see what is output.

it should be something like:

print: 1 56
print: 0 56
print: 1 47
print: 0 47

the first digit is a note on/off and the 2nd digit is a midinumber.

(i got my old linux machine running again, so i can chat anytime now)

so, to turn a list into two streams, you can use [unpack f f], and then one stream comes out of each outlet of the unpack object.

i have never used synthedit, but from what i understand pd is more 'low level' ..ie closer to a programming language. the learnign curve is a bit steep at times, but if you stick with it you make it through. you don't have to learn really hard maths or anything. (unless you want to)

(oh, and stick with obiwan's stuff if you want to learn things... i just make shit for myself, and sometimes think it might be useful for others if i post it, but my coding is pretty messy and i'm sure there's heaps of basic stuff i don't understand yet)

thanks i'll have another look,with se there's modules(both native+3rd party) like osc,math etc,then you can things together into a container or put loads of containers together and save as a prefab(also save as vst which is nice).so it's a bit similar,not quite as low level,though you can code modules if you know how.
once i learn the jargon and some basics it should get easier.i find it easier to make things from scratch rather than make sense of someones brain.there's loads of examples of se creations,but when you open them up it's a shocking mess to me!
i'm a simple lofi guy,so it's only little noise machines i'll be messin with.
do you think pd will ever have 'save to vst'?

i don't know.

miller said he plans to implement native state saving in pd though, which would be a big bonus.

Hey spacedad, currently there's PdVst (http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/pdvst/) which allows you to load your pd patches as a vst in the host of your liking. I tried it once and got it working in flstudio. However, there's a lot of parameter passing and converting. Besides that you also had to use GrIPD, which i don't really like, so i abandonned it. Maybe you'll like it?

Good luck,

Domien

hi domien,
yes i have tried pdvst,sorry i should have mentioned it.
i did get it working in energyXT after a bit of a struggle,tried a couple of synth examples out,worked fine,though i couldn't save presets unless the synth had built in patch system.
pdvst was what got me to try pd really,i'm hoping to get my own creations working, once i get past the basics.
still,save as vst would be nice as it allows you to share your creations further afield.
not really sure why gripd isn't good,i've not got as far as gui's yet and the synth i tried didn't have one anyway.