Ms. Pinky's Maxi-Patch

A system that let's you scratch anything.

Now with Ms. Pinky's Interdimensional Wrecked System and Max/MSP/Jitter, you can use a turntable to scratch anything. The system consists of special records (2 pink or 2 traditional black) in conjunction with software. You connect one or more turntables through a phono pre-amp to your computer's audio input or audio interface. The downloadable Ms. Pinky's Maxi-Patch software lets you scratch audio files and QuickTime movies.

If you want to go further and develop your own scratching performance system, you can use Ms. Pinky's Max/MSP objects that analyze the audio from the turntables playing her records and produce "control signals" that can be applied to any aspect of an interactive audio or video application: file or movie playback, synthesis, DSP effects, spatialization, or 3-D animation. Or all of these, all at the same time. You can even sample the scratching signal, record it to disk, loop it, or retrigger it.

Get More Details
Why Ms. Pinky and Max/MSP?
System Requirements
Pricing and Purchasing

More Details

Here's an example of how the Maxi-Patch integrates into the standard DJ Setup shown below:

If you add a computer, an audio interface (analog-to-digital converter) with at least 4 channels of input and 4 channels of output, and two phono pre-amps, you get the system shown here:

The main Maxi-Patch software screen is shown below. This is a Max/MSP/Jitter application that allows you to control the playback of digital audio files (WAV, AIFF, and MP3) as well as QuickTime movies using your standard DJ turntables. In the upper part of the window are three small video display regions where you can watch QuickTime movies as they play back under the control of your turntables. Apply rotate and zoom effects to the video, adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation.. all in real-time. The output from the two video players can be mixed using standard crossfade, alpha keying, chroma keying, and 37 different mathematical functions. The final video mix is viewed in a separate window which can be used for output to a projector. Below the video display regions in the main window of "Maxi-Patch" are sections for loading and playing audio files (WAV, AIFF, and MP3) using turntable control, and applying advanced filtering functions to the audio file playback. Parameters of these filters can even be "scratched" using your turntables. You can also control various parameters throughout the program using your favorite MIDI controller.

The "Maxi-Patch" is simple to use and provides a great introduction to the possibilities of Ms. Pinky's Interdimensional Wrecked System.

Why Ms. Pinky + Max/MSP?

If you are interested in applying turntable technique to computerized music and/or video, there isn't a more flexible system than Ms. Pinky's Interdimensional Wrecked System in combination with Max/MSP/Jitter. In Max/MSP, the audio signal from your turntable as it plays the MsPinky vinyl is analyzed with the use of a highly optimized tracking algorithm that provides nearly instantaneous velocity and absolute position information. In other words, you know when the turntable is moving forward or backward, and at what speed... and you know exactly where in the groove the needle currently is. Below is a part of the "help patch" for the MPTC~ object that takes audio input from adc~ and turns it into turntable velocity, power, and absolute position signals. The velocity signal has a positive value when the turntable is moving forward, and negative when it is moving backward. The higher the value, the faster the speed. The power signal ranges between 0.0 and 1.0, and provides a useful "muting" signal to stop spurious velocity values from disrupting subsequent processing when the turntable velocity approaches 0.0. The third signal is an instantaneous absolute position indicator. MsPinky's vinyl records contain approximately 155 unique position stamps per rotation, and no position stamp is repeated on the record. This works out to a totally unique position stamp being calculated and made available to your Max/MSP environment approximately 86.12 times per second when the vinyl is played at 33-1/3 rpm and the sampling rate is 44.1 kHz. The time lag or latency is only about 12 milliseconds.

Using the limitless possibilities of Max/MSP's modular building-block design, you can use these three signals to control sample playback, audio file playback, synthesis, filtering, or other DSP effects. With Jitter, you add a comprehensive video environment expressly designed to be responsive to live performance. Since you can add other kinds of MIDI-based controllers, the turntable can be just one element of an amazing performance application. Max/MSP isn't for everyone, but for those whose imagination can't be constrained by prefabricated software, nothing else will do.

Ms. Pinky's Maxi-Patch shows just some of the combined capabilities of these powerful technologies. It's a great way to start the marriage of the turntable and computer. If you're already a Max/MSP user, all you need is the basic fan club membership to keep you busy with scratching application development.

System Requirements

The standalone Ms. Pinky's Maxi-Patch application runs under Mac OS 9, OS X, or WinXP and requires:

A Power Macintosh computer, recommended G3 processor of 800 Mhz or better, 256MB of memory.
-OR-
A WinXP Machine with 1 GHz processor or higher and at least 256 MB RAM.

The setup requirements for the entire system include:

At least one, preferably two DJ turntables. Make sure your cartridges are in good shape, otherwise the software may not track properly
A standard DJ mixer, with switchable phono/line inputs.
An audio interface with two input channels per turntable you wish to use. So when you want to use two turntables, you must have four audio input channels. It is also preferable to have two audio output channels per turntable so that you can mix between the two stereo pairs of outputs independently using your DJ mixer. Otherwise, if you have only 2 output channels, you will have to mix internally on the computer (not a bad option, just probably not what you're used to).
The signals from your turntable need to be raised to line-level before going into your computer. This means you'll need some kind of pre-amp (phono preferably, but a mic pre-amp will work too). You most likely will not be able to use the phono pre-amps built-in to your DJ mixer because you need to get the signal from the mixer to the computer pre-fader. If your mixer has pre-fader insert FX send/receive pairs, you won't need the extra phono preamps. But most DJ mixers don't have this capability. Consequently most people will need extra phono pre-amps to make their system work. But don't worry, phono pre-amps are cheap. Or maybe you have an old home stereo sitting around that you can use as a phono pre-amp.

Pricing and Purchasing

You have a few purchase options:

You can purchase the Ms. Pinky Membership (software and 4 records) as an add-on to your Max/MSP or Max/MSP/Jitter order at the Cycling '74 online store for $60.
Or, you can purchase just the membership (software and 4 records) at either the Cycling '74 online store or the Ms. Pinky online store for $99.

If you've looked at similar systems that are dedicated to file scratching only, you know that Ms. Pinky is available at a very attractive price. But she's not cheap: this stuff really works.