Jonny Greenwood talks Max with the people who make it

Jonny Greenwood has answered a short set of questions from Cycling '74, the company behind Max, the programming software he builds his own effects and sequencers with. His patches are messy and unreliable, he admits, like old cars that need the engine tinkered with every few miles, and that drives Thom Yorke crazy.

When Radiohead record, their producer Nigel Godrich is forever telling him that's a great sound from Max, but could you get rid of the clicks¹, though less often than he used to. It was a friend of Godrich's who suggested Max in the first place, because it was taught at the friend's music college. Max took Greenwood back to a childhood spent programming home computers for fun, in Basic and then simple machine code. The studio software Radiohead met when they started out had put him off: Cubase and Logic seemed to want him to write in 4/4 at 120 beats a minute, with the first four bars looped. Max let him decide for himself what a delay or a sequencer should do.

I could start from the ground, and think in terms of sound and maths. It was like coming off the rails.

Jonny Greenwood¹

He uses chance in his patches all the time, and likes the human kind too, especially from a string orchestra. What he would still like is zero latency, and to understand the maths behind Fourier transforms.

something about phrases like 'imaginary time domain' always makes my head hurt

Jonny Greenwood¹