Max Patcher Shapes

When I used to teach Max, I always reminded my students to do some preparatory ‘shaping’ work, before diving in with code. This would involve laying out the general premise and structure of a patcher. Kind of like having do points and paragraph headers for persuasive essays in order to get the lay of the land, and give someone a starting point. I would always get the, to layout here ‘blocks’ of code might go, in order to plan. Code can always be written and spatially optimized later. I’d suggest using comments and coloured panels to do this. Any manipulator, interface, effect, video or audio tool can be laid out like this. Always start with in puts and outputs. Knowing what you will start with and what you will end with gives you the head start. This involves anything coming in or out of the computer/patcher, or the transfer of data within a patcher. I’d then lay out any modifiers, manipulators or shapers to data. Finally thinking about any gates, switches and routing is estimated ahead of time.  Below, I have some visual examples of some of these layouts with example applications. Happy max patching!