Metronomica.blog
jamuary 13, 2025
I have left an absolute graveyard of abandoned Cubase and Bitwig projects in my wake. So many songs over so many years that just weren’t doing it for me, relegated to forgotten hard drives. Every once in a while I stumble upon a project file from six years ago and I am astounded at how far along I got before giving up on it. Huge projects that just weren’t worth it.
Today I felt myself circling the drain again. I had some piano and some bass and some drums, semi-generatively plonking around, without any purpose or interest. It was fine, which means it was bad.
This time, though, I had to get something out the door. It’s Jamuary, and I didn’t have the hours to start over after a failure. So I got desperate. I bussed the entire song — drums and all — to one song, and threw Other Desert Cities on as an insert. I used a tape mode to slow the song down (and pitch it down), then used the built-in LFOs to move some parameters around on their own. I let the tape machine mangle the song on its way to my headphones. Voila:
I like this. The old loops appear and disappear like ghosts trying to escape the void. The whole is much more, and much, much stranger, than the sum of its parts.
By writing so many days in a row this Jamuary, I’m forcing myself to learn lessons. About the sounds I gravitate towards, the music I like to make, the techniques I’d like to learn. When this is all over I’ll write some blowout post that interrogates how I feel about making music. The more days that pass, and the more days I pass this assignment, the more I’m learning about the kind of musician I am.
The more I write music, the more I’m convinced I can write music.
And I’m learning about the kind of music I write — not just when backed up against the wall and searching for an emotional outlet, but when it’s time to just sit down and make something. Maybe I’ll soon be able to describe myself to myself, instead of searching, infrequently, for who I am.
// tags: making music jamuary