I’ve been thinking about how I approach composition and arrangement differently from when I am totally ITB on Ableton and when I use either my Digitakt or my Syntakt.
In Ableton I find that I often set myself up easily and quickly. That is: I’ll write some drums, write a pad, write a bass line, and so on, maybe add some LFO and automation stuff and then I’ll have myself a perfectly nice 8 or 16 bar loop house/techno loop. Making the loop is the easy part, and I have probably a hundred of them now. The trouble is arranging, which on Ableton always feels a bit boring, perfunctory—transforming the loop into a track.
On the Elektron devices, on the other hand, I do the same as the above (drums, pad, bass, whatever), and then have a blast jamming on them using the Ctrl + All function, muting things here and there, unmuting, whatever. That said, it always feels like “jamming” and not like I’m actually writing a coherent song with the kinds of tension, release, and separate sections / moments you’d likely want for an electronic track.
The question I have, for people who use the above machines (or a Digitone, or whatever)—how often does “jamming” actually translate to an actual song you port over to your DAW?
I know the problem here is with the person at the respective machines, and not the machines themselves. But I guess I’m just curious to hear how people approach scratch to track without getting bogged down into endless loop mode.
This is just how I usually use the Syntakt unless I’m doing video game music.
I guess when I do a cover though I do have to think about the structure a lot more, but in those cases I’m following something that was already made before.
I don’t think getting into endless loop mode is a bad thing, but as @Microtribe describes above is a great way to evolve your patterns. Do it long enough and you’ll be surprised how much your loop evolves into a thing.
Honestly this doesn’t really feel like a problem to me. I make really different stuff in bitwig than I do on koala, and I make really different stuff from either when I use my hardware instruments. I write different stuff on guitar than i do on keys. I wrote really different stuff for my two piece husker due ripoff band than I did in my doom sludge band. It’s the nature of this stuff I think. I try to embrace it.
Do they? I think a lot of people are stuck in endless loop mode.
I’m not great at following the formula, it’s kind of boring to me so the jams are more interesting but sometimes I listen back and they lack that structure that I wanted.
I have a theory that it’s difficult to be a connoisseur and a creator in the same workspace. In that right, unless it’s something which has a structure that is fundamentally written into the composition, a lot of the time I try to record a jam (jams) and listen back on a device which is incapable of altering the sound and by removing my ability to change it, I’m almost instantly able to tell what I hate and want to change.
The difficulty is in not instantly going back and changing it because if you take the time to listen through the stuff that you hate, you can also find parts that you love.
There was someone on this forum a couple of years ago and I wish I could remember who but they challenged themselves to make a loop. Jam it out into a couple of loops. Good bad whatever. Then put them together and make a full track with it. Record it and move on.
So I tried that for a couple of months and I still do it now. I make whole playlists of my own tracks that I listen to and that’s always feeding back into the creative process.
I don’t go back to the tracks themselves but I do go back to the ideas.
When I jam on Syntakt (or Digitakt or A4) a lot of times, my jam is simply a jam, and it isn’t ever going to turn into a structured song. Even then, I enjoy recording jams like that sometimes, but at no point was my goal to create a “song”.
However, if I get into a jam and I find it to be especially good, I might copy it over a few patterns and work it into a structured song. That usually just looks like finding new melody, rhythm, and chord progression variations, and trying different things out. Sometimes it takes me 2 or 3 sessions to get it to the state I want. And sometimes I get lost or lose motivation and it never gets finished.
Other times, I set out to make a song from the get-go. In those cases, I usually have a structure / melody / specific idea in mind, and I tackle it section-by-section and track-by-track.
Jamming on Elektron devices is HOW I make my songs. Get a really good pattern happening, then perform the arrangement while recording the stereo out. Done. Not all songs need to be broken out into separate tracks and arranged over a long period of time.
This is it. Don’t get bogged down thinking everything has to be arranged to perfection. I jam stuff out and record straight to wav. I then use Sound Forge to edit these jams into tracks. I’ve worked this way since the 90’s. Before we had digital editing available all my stuff was just recorded straight to tape or dat. Not everyone works this way but it sounds like a method that might work for you, based on what you’re describing. Laying out arrangements in a DAW can be a real drag but editing jams in a stereo editor like Sound Forge etc is more instant and fun
I’m assuming (often not a good idea I know) that you want a completed track which has a song-like structure. If that’s the case you’re skipping the composition part and jumping straight to arranging and production.
Consider not trying to get to a loop which you’re entirely happy with and trust your skills in arrangement and production: sketch out the basics of the finished track. The go back and arrange.
The frequency doesn’t really matter, IMO. What matters are how happy you are with the results and the time spent doing it. I’ve had success both ways. But never have I thought to myself, I’m way under my normal rate of turning jams into songs, I need to fix that! The material should inspire this decision.
And as others have said, nothing wrong at all with skipping multi-tracking and just recording a stereo file. I’ve done that many times and it takes a lot of the decision paralysis out of the process. I think it all really depends on you, the material, and your relationship to it.
Reviving this a bit as you might find DMX krew’s process interesting. I’m trying to practice it myself. Basically jamming a song in an organised way to be edited down into a structured song. Jamming for only around 10 mins creating structured sections, editing to a track that’s 5 mins or so:
Jam these patterns a couple of days to set velocities and microtimings to perfection or ‘the best you can do at the moment’ (this thing really is my weakest point in DAW - I just literally can’t stand editing velocities and dragging notes with mouse on piano roll, DT surgical precision is light years better in my taste).
Play these patterns in context with other gear (outboard effects etc).
Record a couple of audio raw demos (tweaking patterns and outboard gear live, just to feel the structure of the song) - this way you get ideas on expression, development and length of the song.
Drag and drop the best demo in your DAW.
Re-record it using demo as reference in structure and length via Overbridge and other plugins. You can also jam using Overbridge, and record MIDI, later you can edit MIDI clip and re-record fully automated isolated tracks. Only thing to keep in mind is that FUNC+NO pattern reset won’t record in MIDI clip this way, unfortunately.
Takes time, but helps to overcome some pitfalls of hardware jamming (like having to edit live performance mistakes on raw audio demos) or sterile DAW-only production (like ‘copying+pasting’ clips without listening to every iteration of the clip or drawing automations with your hand and eyes, without listening to the whole context of the track from start to end).
And, of course, trig conditions on elektron machines can make 16 step sequence interesing and always evolving. Corresponding MIDI clip in DAW will be much longer and feel ‘less rubust’ (I know you can set % probability in later Ableton versions, it just sits deep below the control surface, seems not too fancy).
This method seems to me the closest to playing songs on a instrument in a live band, you just don’t skip crucial stages of production.
With OB2, it is possible to multitrack record your “jam” as you play it (I recommend muting the OB2 inputs though so you dont need to worry about latency).
I used to only record 2-track jams for the longest time. Then I started working in a position where I was exposed to commercially recorded multitracks of both studio sessions as well as televised live performances, and realized that multitracking doesn’t have to mean your music is recorded in stages, or in bits and pieces, it can still be a completely live performance which just happens to get captured to a 24-track instead of a 2-track. Haven’t really looked back since.
I still do record 2-tracks takes and jams, but no longer see them as “superior” to multitrack recordings, the opposite in fact. In a 2-track recording, there is no way to fix that slight misbalance of track levels, or to mute that one bum note that crept into the performance… “I’m no Jerry Lewis” as someone said, I’d rather fix that one little thing in an otherwise perfect take than re-record a dozen or more times, and lose my flow state while doing it…
The challenge IME, is to get your multitrack recording process to be as invisible as possible, so that you can just record a take when you feel you’re ready, instead of getting bogged down with the logistics of it all (routing/cabling/mixer woes). Something like OB2 and a preconfigured DAW template, all set ready to go, is a superb asset for that sort of thing.
