Metronomica.blog
jamuary 23, 2025
Jamuary is all about working, iterating, and failing in public, right?
I noticed the ambient pieces I’ve made this month tended towards busy walls of sound. I find it fun to pick out the unique bits lurking beneath the distortions and reverbs — the snippets of melodies lost to swirling effects, new walls rushing to meet the old walls. Today I wanted to work against that impulse and make something sparser.
It all came together in my head, and I set up the complete session in AUM without listening to anything. A two-note motif in Fugue Machine spread to four Decent Sampler instruments, all of which were plucky rather than droney. Everything went to a bus with two instances of Other Desert Cities — one reverse delay and one stereo delay — and finally through a reverb to glue it together.
The more I sit with it (after spending some time MASSIVELY cutting a violent resonant frequency in the master), the more I don’t mind it. It asks a different question of the listener than something like this. Here, you’re searching for the spare, individual notes, wondering how their timings will intersect, and the ambient bed underneath it is just their echoes. There, you get full-width bombardment of strings and noise, and you can lock into the persistent piano melody that lies beneath.
Often, my ambient work seems to have traces of melody. I think I’m more comfortable making something that offers the listener (or myself) a place to lock in and focus, a bit of melody or harmony that scaffolds the noise that grows around it. Today, fighting that impulse, I came up with something I don’t enjoy as much. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like another tool to be strategically deployed. Maybe these disparate approaches can coexist, a searching ambient track with no backbone suddenly jolted into a musically consistent framework.
// tags: making music jamuary