#jamtember2021 Track – Sunny Side Up

Some house music… recorded some of the jam off to the Wav Recorder… and some of it made it to the YouTube video.

The picture is just a quick doodle that I did on my iPad. Just done in ProCreate…. just now… while thinking about what to do with this track.

Here’s the YouTube video.

So a few notes here… I am routing all of my output on the MPC out either 3/4 or 5/6, and into the Eurorack, and then processing everything through a couple different chains including Morphagene, Mimeophon, Beads, Sqwk Dirty, and Data Bender, and then going out to the ST Mix.

Part of the recording on Soundcloud does sound a little weird, because… well because a couple of the tracks were output to L/R (or 1/2 if you prefer) while I was trying some of the sounds out and seeing what I wanted to record for the video. I actually clipped out most of this, but I figured I’d leave some of the early stuff in, because you never know what you might want to go back to. Especially when a lot of the way I’m making tracks with the Eurorack are rather ephemeral, so I guess I just “always record” in case I have a track I want to go back to and try and at least chop and rearrange a little bit, when the context of what I put together.

So lessons learned? First, this was pretty fun, and I’ll need to think around this a bit more. I basically just created 3 different tracks with different programs, and then used track mute/pad mute to transition through different 2 bar sections. Nothing fancy, but it was pretty fun and a quick way to get something off the ground through the Eurorack filters. What I would definitely change though is that I confused the heck out of myself with how I setup the stereo tracks on the ST Mix, there was no real reason for the order of anything, which made me have to look at the cables a few times and figure out what was going to what. Clearly a bit more presence of mind and clarity around this will help out.

Stay tuned… need to do one more track to finish off the month!

#jamtember2021 Track – One Hit Striker

I wanted to use some of the patching done yesterday for the ambient tracks to make some DnB… woohoo!

Practice Session first… there’s plenty of mistakes, offbeat content, and a few places that some of the sounds got a bit too wild… oops.

From here I did a few more takes and settled on the following take as the ‘final’ for this track.

For those who want a higher quality version of the audio for this final (probably) take you can get it at SoundCloud from below.

So what did I do to put all of this together?

Well… in particular I decided I would keep the patching and more or less the settings used to make the ambient pieces from yesterday the same. I did make a few tweaks to Pamela’s New Workout in order to change the rate of the sequence changes to suit my needs for the DnB pace so that I would use 8 settings instead of 2, because I was hitting reset so often that it only had time to play the two different settings. This was possibly fine, but I wanted to have it hang on the ambient sounds a bit longer. I also went through that bell sound, sped it up, and tried to get something that would just roll a bit faster through the mimeophon, which required a bit more feedback and changes to some of the Halo and Color settings.

On the MPC I loaded up a DnB drum kit, and decided to play out some drums and bass, and then I routed all of that into the Sqwk Dirty, and then into a Data Bender in order to get the bulk of the glitchiness and sound. I probably should have considered syncing the Data Bender to the clock, but it is kind of interesting while playing unsynced and hearing some of the tearing glitches.

All sounds from the MPC were routed out to the Eurorack, and everything was mixed in ST Mix, then sent back to the MPC inputs 1/2 with monitor turned on in order to output to my speakers/recorder.

#jamtember2021 Track – Floating Above

Another track with the Euro… and another late night jam session

Didn’t play the patch much, and heck it wasn’t even terribly complicated. Mostly just two different sounds loaded into the Morphagenes, one piano loop that I ran through the Beads which gave a kind of organ type of sound, and the other was some bell kind of sound that I ran through the Mimeophon that is making that more low end drone.

I did record a higher quality audio version to the WAV Recorder as well, which I posted up on soundcloud.

#jamtember2021 Track – Passed the Sunrise

Just a straight up Eurorack event today… nothing else…

Above is the recording that I did on the eurorack, from just a couple of samples in both the Morphagenes and stretched to their limits. There is some digital artifacting or clipping sounds, and I’ll be honest, it is hard to tell if it is coming from something in the chain specifically I am doing wrong, or just a side effect of the Data Bender doing it’s thing and I wasn’t paying attention to what I had it doing.

A minute or so in I decided to hit the 4ms WAV Recorder to make sure I had a higher quality recording as well… and maybe it was clipping? I’m going to have to go back later today and see what might be giving me the hard time because some of the glitchiness and clipping sounded good to me, and some of it was definitely not intended. Ah well… here is the track on soundcloud as well.

Comparing the audio levels on the YouTube recording through the Zoom H6 (which was definitely not clipping) and the 4MS WAV Recorder definitely leads me to thinking that I need to experiment around that space.

#jamtember2021 Track – Green Light

Just messing around way more today than I have all month… but this is for better or worse lol 😀

So the Jam Session… just loaded up a kit and figured I’d mess around for 10-15 minutes

Near the end I had no idea what I had in the Morphagene buffers, and just kind of went with it. Not really choices I should have made, but whatever… just messing around.

Ended up taking what I made from the drum kit and just putting a bit of a rough track together… wasn’t really sure what else to do :/

Wanted to spend more time on a track or two today, but ended up building a rail post and a gate to help keep the puppies on the deck and prevent them from escaping! Just the left post was probably 4 hours of time… then building the gates and installing it was at least two, but maybe three more hours.

So musically today felt a bit like a bust, but on the other hand I did get a project done.

#jamtember2021 Track – Latitude

This is two takes… I recorded some YouTube videos and uploaded to soundcloud as well… take two is better, but just wanted to show what the heck I was doing.

And… here are the YouTube videos

Anyways… for those who are interested… finally gettin Beads added to the case and was just messing around with the Beat Slicer mode to see how well it would work by itself and with Data Bender. I’m digging it, but feel like I need to get a bit more control over it on the MPC side… or record some better sequences/patterns into the Eurorack modules (Pams/Tete/Mimetic Digitalis… whatever)… or not. Definitely going to keep trying but I feel like this was a bit too much glitch.

Also… the second take felt like it came out much better, likely because I had practice from the first take so I knew my way around better. Who would have though? 😀

#jamtember2021 Track – Wanderlust

Hah… this shook out after three or four failed attempts to get something jamming right.

Picture is from the trip to Yellowstone… I mean… if you ever can… you got to go. Just amazing.

Yeah yeah yeah… another vaporwave style… and I swear, I’ll get some videos up of the process I’m doing… honestly nothing too fancy, but I should probably see if I can get something similar to work just within the MPC instead of needing two… retro/older… Boss SPs… yet… it is frequently working… so what do I know.

#jamtember2021 Track – Don’t Forget Grandma

So… you literally have to smile when you hear the song and see the pic together… It’s like illegal or something if you don’t. Now… you don’t have to like either individually, but as a total package… well…

The picture is of my grandmother, or as many people knew her, as the world’s grandma. She was a great woman who cared for everybody. Honestly, she was amazing.

Anyways… just standard song duty for the day, kinda hit or miss again for me… probably time to push myself in another direction, but I’ve been trying to see what happens if I just do the same style/process for a month. What I think is happening is that I’m getting faster at the process, but also getting pickier… who’d have thought?

Well… back to it 😀