Pilcrow Records

Scripter MIDI Effects Plug-In

musictech

As people have seen in the Reddit streams (all 6 of you *chortle*, and there's another one coming tonight at around 9p EST), I like to play around with randomly/procedurally generated music. The music isn't entirely random because I've tried that and it sounds pretty bad. At least some basic music theory needs to be applied to make it accessible. To this end, I've been poking around Logic Pro looking for all of the randomization possibilities.

The Scripter plug-in offers the greatest potential because it leverages the JavaScript programming language. Scripter allows for the real-time capture and manipulation of MIDI events, including creating them outright within a script. The possibilities are almost endless, and it's been a lot of fun playing around with it.

However, after working with it for a while, I noticed that it has some limitations to it, both in terms of the JavaScript language itself, and how it handles MIDI events in general. Nothing necessarily bad (though there are some small annoyances), just unexpected. The issues I found got really technical fast, but they can be off-putting to anyone new to the plug-in, either musically or programmatically. Apple's documentation really just sticks to the facts, and a lot of the nuance I found just simply isn't mentioned. The Apple-supplied scripts are really fantastic, but unless a user has some programming knowledge, their utility as a learning resource is limited. There only a few articles and message board posts I found on the internet, and those are typically even more high level than Apple's documentation. In other words, Scripter is deep, complicated, and the documentation which exists provides enough information to get someone in trouble, but not enough to get out.

Starting a few months ago, I started poking at the boundaries of the plug-in and writing down all of the capabilities and limitations I could find. I'm now in the throes of putting this all into a book, which I fully expect to have done by the end of the year. The book will cover both the deep technical aspects of Scripter, and will also include a complete tutorial for the Logic Pro user who has never programmed before. I think it's going to be great, and I should have some good scripts come out of this I can use in the Reddit streams.