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Graphical Patching

#1

I was a Graphical Designer by trade, and always find it a bit easier to do things in a graphical manner. The graphical patching on the SSP is OK, but for me it is a bit harder to visualize when away from the machine. Also the unavoidable menu selection process is sometimes overwhelming when you have all 24 inputs and outputs happening. When this happens I find it easier to graph out a patch drawing ahead of time. To make this easier for me. I spent some time and made little graphical elements of all the modules on the SSP, (at least all the ones on thetechnobear’s wiki). I then made PNG files of all of them and put them on my DropBox so everyone can use their favorite programs that support PNG images, to create or document patches. Almost every word processor can even import a PNG file. They look like this with inputs the left and outputs on the right.

CLDS
CLDS349×705 9.57 KB

You can find the individual PNG files in this folder - Dropbox

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#2

there are some patching diagram tools around that you could also use.

I messed with patchbook for a while (for AE modular).
its pretty nice, its just text, so its really quick to document with.

the pro/con is , its just text, so you use your own/any text editor, but that means it doesn’t have any special tools.eg. a module repository.
that said, because its text, you can keep the modules in a separate text file and just cut n’ paste :slight_smile:

though, in fairness the way I used it was only to document connections I made and parameters Id change from default (or were ‘important’) - as I found that made the diagrams a bit more concise. so that mean I didnt really need a repository for modules.

Im pretty sure there were other tools around as well.

but, after a while, I found I wasn’t really ever going back to the diagrams I made, so stopped bothering :slight_smile:

#3

I get it. I may not use these a lot either, but I found I needed something like them while making a recent patch that has 8 channels of audio over USB, but also used all 16 input jacks for control voltages. I couldn’t keep the routing pairs (they were 4 stereo feeds) together in my head, so wanted to visualize them. I first just made the module drawings of the ones I used in the patch, and then in a boring afternoon, decided to raise my chops in a new graphics program by making all the others. Somebody might be able to use them.
Oh course my dream is that some guy with computer chops would make an app that takes .pbp files and draws out these for me (and ultimately can go the other way too). I doubt that will happen though. A lot of effort for no pay, which is totally understandable too. I wish I had the chops.

Thay Patchbook program looks pretty neat. I will have to look into that.

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