Metronomica.blog
jamuary 31, 2025 - it’s done
I did not think I would complete this challenge. Jamuary asks you to build, perform, and release a track every single day. The tracks don’t have to be perfect, or complete, necessarily, but you have to put in the work.
In a few days I’m going to write another post. I’m going to relisten to all 108 minutes of music I made, try to digest it, and see where it leaves me. Where I might go next. But for now, I’m really, really happy I was able to see this through.
My goal today was to take what I’ve learned from iPad music-making over the past month and combine it all, create an encapsulation of the month. So I pulled from the usual suspects:
- A few Decent Sampler instruments like piano and choir, conducted by Fugue Machine, each slathered with effects, like:
- Other Desert Cities, for delays and simple granular processing
- Eos 2 for big reverb
- Velvet Machine for bigger, moving reverb
- Rymdigare, for wobbly lo-fi, reverb, and destruction-by-waveshaping
- Other Desert Cities, for delays and simple granular processing
- A multi-head delay via Other Desert Cities on the master bus to pitch everything down live, with all sorts of slow LFO modulation to move it around.
- A bunch of unsavory clicking noises that I didn’t expect (sorry)
And created something, to steal from my post on lines, that sounded like:
A droney thing, ebbing and flowing, with fragments of melodies swirling around like a whirlpool.
It really does kind of sound like the past 30 days stacked on top of each other and flattened by a hydraulic press, which is perfect for the final day of this month.
I’m looking forward to working through my thoughts a bit more — to figure out what this month meant for me as a musician, but also what it meant for me as an internet denizen. This month I took steps to delete facebook and instagram, to move off of some other platforms; I dug deep into this blog, learning Markdown and planning an eventual self-hosting solution; I spent time posting on lines and joined mastodon.
If one of my overarching life goals in 2025 is to reclaim a small slice of the internet for myself, like I had 20-odd years ago, January has been a wonderful start.
// tags: making music jamuary