Metronomica.blog
jamuary 26, 2025
As I wrote when sharing this on lines, “I made this piecemeal over the past 10 hours in the precious moments when there wasn’t a screaming child trying to harmonize.”
The goal, initially, was to dig into Fluss, a very cool and fully featured granular effects processor and instrument for iPad. I fed it a little pattern via Rings FX, a port of Mutable Instruments Rings to the iPad environment. I figured if I wanted to play with a new granular effect, I might as well start by trying to Rings -> Clouds it.
I figured out quickly that Fluss can work as a meme ambient machine, but it doesn’t really want to. It doesn’t want to be set and forget; it’s happy to work in less tonal areas. I got lost playing with the neat UI, where you can fling balls around an XY grid, set the friction to determine when (and if) they stop, and listen as grains move between notes and octaves.
I had played for a while and I was running out of time and I hadn’t made anything good or interesting. I had learned Fluss, a little. But I needed something to post. So I went with a preset.
From there, things fell into place. Rings FX became a more traditional piano, and suddenly I had the background texture for a piece. That it became such a moody, spare affair with choir and downtempo drums is just luck. I’m not sure how it happened. but it happened, and now I’m 26 days deep into Jamuary.
// tags: making music jamuary