Conceptual Wizard Button Question!

[the_duckchild]

I’ve got the germ of an idea for a crusher/bitshifter type patch. For it to really work, ideally i’d like to be able to use two of the buttons on the Alchemist to “scroll” up/down to select what one of the other buttons effects.

the aim is to experiment with something like this:

The "Bit Crumbler" - Max For Live Device

and I’d like two of the buttons to act as Left/right for the slider at the bottom, and the third button to turn on/off whichever of the square buttons is selected (ideally using the LED to indicate the selection or the on/off state)

I’m pretty new to MAX/~gen and I am not sure if this is possible, or what to google to start building an idea of how this might work… just wondering if anyone might have any tips of where to start thinking about it (or if it’s completely impossible)

thanks!

[mars]

great sounds!

So there are 10 bits of a bitmask that you can turn on and off?

It strikes me that you could use a knob to go from 0 (all bits off) to 1023 (all bits on). It would be quite hard to dial in a specific value, such as 0000100000, which would probably sound very different from 1111000000 even though they are adjacent values.

If you only want one bit on at a time, you could go for powers of two: 2^n with n = 0 to 9, ie: 0, 1, 2, 4, 8… all have one bit set, or none.

Otherwise @martinruss wrote a tutorial on making a toggle button in Gen, have a look at

Modulated sine-waves in gen = SinesAtmosphereToggle... Patches

Thank you for the feedback! Much appreciated. I have always loved making sound generators - right from the 1970s when I used cascading unjunction oscillators...

[the_duckchild]

ah great, thanks, those are both good things to read/think about!

[dan_remaincalm]

That plugin you reference looks very inspired by the OTO Biscuit - a bank of bit manipulation switches into a filter etc.

I recently posted a plugin that takes a slightly different approach to the same thing.

Paranoia - fuzz + bitcrusher + mangler C++ effect

Hi there. I’ve ported my Paranoia effect to the OWL using the C++ environment. A different take on the same effect ships with the Reaper DAW. Paranoia’s structure is inspired by the OTO Biscuit, but takes a few things in very different directions, and this version is optimized for the four knobs on the OWL and tuned for guitar. Most controls are interactive and multi-modal. It’s a kickass gated fuzz with the right settings, and might also be useful for ruining drum loops or bass synth. Topo…

If you look at the code in here:…

OWL Patch Library

…scroll down to “initMangler” and you can see that I’ve pre-programmed a set of bit-manipulation patterns. Then one of the knobs just sweeps though those patterns.

It ends up being way more immediate approach and lets you get a lot of very interesting textures quickly. I don’t know enough about Max/Gen to know if there’s an easy way to do the same thing, but it might be easier than managing state via the button.

[the_duckchild]

oh brill, yes, I was absolutely thinking about OTO biscuit, so this is very interesting indeed, thanks! Will have a play