I've been really interested in utilising ModSquad, an example patch for MaxMSP for ways other than remixing Amen Breaks, so I recorded four different sounds (a road, a sink full of water, and two tracks of me making mouth sounds). I paulstretched the road sounds in Audacity, while the rest were chucked straight into ModSquad. When in ModSquad, I mapped the "beats per loop", "bpm", "quick tempo", "pitch bend" and the volume to different knobs and played around for about 7 minutes for each track. I really enjoyed playing with knobs (insert funny joke here) when it comes to MaxMSP, it feels like a way to get away from the keyboard and tuning and it also just sounds wacky and fun, which I enjoy.
The beats per loop function, which signifies how many beats there are in a soundfile, when improvising around, can act as an interesting speed up or slow down function. From what I can gather, it sections off the soundfile into that number of beats. I'm not going to pretend that I understand all the complicated math behind it, but it is really good if you want to get to a specific part of the sound file. Say the file has a couple seconds of silence, if the beats per loop value is lowered, it skips quicker to the next part. Also, for pitched sounds, lowering the beats per loop give it that iconic sped up sound, like a VHS rewinding very quickly, which can be played with a lot.
The bpm function is similar to the beats per loop just in a more nuanced sense, and thus a change in input isn't that noticeable (to me at least). It is also a shame that due to me using a MIDI controller, the bpm can only go up to 127, which isn't that fast (again, to me at least). What is fun to pair it up with is the quick tempo function. Now I have almost zero clue how this functions (something to do with creating a tempo based on the beats per loop?), but the bpm function can override the quick tempo, and the quick tempo can override the bpm, and thus moving them both (often in different directions), the fight for control over the tempo between the two controls creates glitching effect, where the soundfile changes from one to another as quickly as it can handle. The flickering sound is used a lot throughout the various improvisations.
If the beats per loop is at zero, and the bpm is moved to another number, an oscillating sound will be created as the program attempts to split the soundfile into 0. The pitch can sadly not be altered, although playing around with the pitch bend does make it go all crackly.
After I recorded all four of the improvisations, I moved all of the tracks onto a REAPER project and added a slight bit of compression onto the master to even things all out. The name dirt soul means nothing, it was just on my list for potential cool song names.