jamuary 2, 2025

After coming up with today’s jam — I made it to two consecutive days, please clap — I listened back to yesterday’s and realized that both are neither songs, nor really ideas ready to be fleshed out. They’re proofs of concept. They’re calcified moments of learning. I can hear that in the arrangements, which are not traditional arrangements as much as they are “let me arrange a sound and an effect and see what it sounds like for a few minutes, then let me arrange a volume fader upward for a while.”

Perhaps, over the course of the month, these proofs will expand. Maybe I’ll continue building a vocabulary of iPad music-making and will soon be able to make exactly what I want, instead of making something that I kind of like. It’s like learning anything, though this is more public.

In order to build that vocabulary, I will need to study actively. At a certain point I will not be able to just mash sounds together and call it a day. Or I will be able to do that, but I won’t have learned anything, and that doesn’t excite me much.

So, I’d like to learn what the hell Rymdigare actually does. It seems so powerful and deep as an ambient/destruction effect, and I’m not content window-shopping presets until I find something I like. That’s how today’s jamuary happened, anyway.

Here’s how everything is organized:

• Fugue Machine has four playheads scanning a nice little melody in D minor. Two of the four playheads send midi to a guitar, and two send midi to a piano, both courtesy of Decent Sampler.
  • The audio from these instruments is sent to an instance of Rymdigare, which does space and crush to it.
    
• A drone comes in later, with a couple of effects on it, via Samplr.
  
• Just a little bit of extra sauce in Bitwig.

That’s it for this one. Tomorrow: Rymdigare? Maybe the input source is a drone and I play the effect until I figure out what it actually does. There are other things I’d like to learn, but I need to start this month with some small, digestible goals, or I’m not going to see this project through.

// tags: making music jamuary

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jamuary 3, 2025 In my post yesterday I wrote about wanting to learn Rymdigare, an iOS app that combines a bunch of effects — a reverb, a filter, a waveshaper, a