Jamuary 2024 Post Mortem

[thejewk]

With January over and done with, and with Jamuary behind us, I thought it might be interesting for the people who took part to have somewhere separate from the original thread to reflect on what we’ve done.

Do you think you achieved what you wanted to? Did you have a masterplan, and did you stick with it? Are you planning on using anything you made for future projects? Any other thoughts?

For me, I’ve never done anything like this before, and I am early on in my electronic music making process. I also only got my Digitakt in the middle of December, and added a Quadrantid Swarm mid way through January. In a way Jamuary actually ended up getting in the way of me doing a lot of necessary setup admin and as a result I used my FM synth a lot less than I would have liked, purely because a lot of the time that I planned to devote to patch management was spent working with my more immediate gear instead. I also went through various small alterations to how my gear is connected for audio and midi routing, and as a result I’ve messed up my Digitakt project templates to the point where I ended up just manually doing setup every time I went to jam, which cut into my actual music making.

That said, I am very happy that I did what I did, and I think I’ve managed to do a lot of work towards developing my techno sound. By regularly recording and listening back to what I had done, and listening closely to a lot of live techno and adjacent music from the Stoor guys, Surgeon, Blawan, etc, I feel like towards the end of the month I started to be able to make decisions live which produced results closer to what I envisioned. Before I was generally playing around with elements until I stumbled on something I liked, but I now I am starting to feel like I know what I want in advance, if that makes sense.

I think I’ve come out the other end with at least 3-4 pieces which I am either happy with, or have things I would like to extract and editing into something more satisfying.

What I didn’t end up doing is making any real progress with my ambient and drone output, and only one piece was at all successful in this area in my view, and that I find unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. I also see that I need a capable DAW, and soon.

I look forward to reading your reflections.

[schoolbabyboy]

this was my second year doing Jamuary and i had a great time participating!

last year i made all of my jams on the M8 i had at the time, that certainly made it easier to get a jam done every day since it is so portable and speedy. this year i started to feel some of the fatigue from needing to be home to make my tune for the day. which isnt to say it was a bad thing, but i found that it felt a little more confining this year because of that change.

i think the main thing i get out of this exercise is the satisfaction of following through with a goal. been doing lots of inner work the past couple years and so much of it revolves around discipline and self motivation. the more i take part in these activities the better those discipline muscles get.

i tend to look at my tunes more as journal entries than as polished pieces of work but despite that i did put together my favorite jams from the month into a mixtape, but that is largely for my own listening pleasure (i am not joking when i say that 90% of my music consumption is my own music). it feels real nice to start off the year with 31 new tunes to listen to.

a thought i found myself having from time to time was “this sounds exactly like another tune i made” but now that im going back and listening again and again, im having a hard time finding the tunes i felt like i was copying! nice to have proof to refute my anxious mind. finding that maybe i just have a personal sound that is present across my many tunes.

[benway]

I’m pretty happy - I started off with the purpose of dusting off a bunch of underused gear seeing what I could get rid of (spoiler alert, I’m keeping everything) with less of a focus on doing quality work, but despite quite a bit of time spent going through manuals, in most cases there’s something in there that’s worth taking further, even if the elements often don’t fit together well. Pleasantly surprised at what I can achieve in an hour or less on gear that I’m not completely fluent with. Managed to do 15 straight days, plus one additional remix of one jam that I kinda hated, then got wiped out with a flu and just did one more testing out the new Pigments update. Not sure I posted my playlist, but here it is.

From here, I’ve gotten into the idea of doing regular 45 minute beat/mix tapes made up of short-ish jams with an emphasis on sample-based stuff and disco/funk edits. My hardware samplers were all high on the list for potential sales, but in each case I’ve come out of the month liking them a lot more, wether for simplicity (Digitakt) or vibes (S3000XL and S2400) - there are a couple of tracks done wholly in the samplers and it’s easy to tell.

The experience did expose fairly clear process issues - I’ve always really been one to try to put down a full composition that was to be The Track, but I’ve started getting much more into the idea of just generating sampler food and jamming with it until something nice emerges. Another thing I really took from the experience is that I can actually really churn stuff out when I’m on a schedule and not so focused on perfection, I think one kinda roadblock in my process is getting from a pretty good groove into a finished track - I’m sure that this applies to most people.

So I figure just stringing together a bunch of grooves on a maybe monthly schedule, maybe every second month will help keep me moving forward and also a vehicle to try things out and see what’s worth putting the effort into doing a full arrangement.

The other thing I took out of it was being a lot more methodical in terms of taking notes of ideas, track titles, pieces of gear or plugins I wanted to use, etc., and then also making quick notes after closing the project just in terms of what’s in it - also bouncing individual elements as audio (and midi in a couple of cases) and tagging/filing them properly so that they can be reused. Probably like a lot of people I’ve got the folders and drives with hundreds of projects that never really went anywhere, this is my idea for trying to ensure that there’s kinda a cumulative and coherent approach and work isn’t just forgotten and wasted gathering dust on a hard drive.

Last thing, despite the emphasis on gear when I started out, I’ve been trying to push in a more DAW / gear agnostic direction. I use Bitwig, Ableton, Logic and a bit of hardware, and each are great for what they’re great at, but also have distinct weaknesses, so I’m trying to get better at pulling out the right tool for the right job and also having the tools serve the musical idea, rather than getting locked into a particular format - whether DAW project or in gear - that both constricts where it might go and prevents it from going anywhere in the first place. So starting to put a lot of emphasis as above on bouncing / tagging audio and midi material separately from the projects or gear.

[Dava]

It was quite the commitment workout but very rewarding for me.
Importantly, it gave rise to a new cut and paste process for birthing a tune, which was itself borne out of the “grab it, hit it, record it” process of imperfectionism which Jamuary kind of stands for.

I have really loosened up and relaxed about how I record things, and would like to keep that alive, perhaps without the need to hurry a track through and record it the same day, though that isn’t such a bad thing either.

A have a little 6 track digest of my favourite moments from Jamuary up on BandCamp now, representing what for me was the best of this process. Fond-memories if you will

edit: here it is…

[thejewk]

@Dava Nice! I’ll check your digest out today when I get a chance to sit down later.

I’ve ended up selecting two pieces from Jamuary which I have now done a bit of mastering on, and I’ve since made and recorded two more pieces which I think are going to make up my first Bandcamp release. I’m just sitting on them for the moment, listening back every few days, just to be sure I’m happy enough with them as a set.

Since this post, I’ve gone ahead and invested in Ableton, which has made the above possible, added a Launch Control XL for live mixing without having to constantly use the mouse to mess with the tiny pan and send dials. I’ve also just purchased an Analog Keys as a workhorse instrument to bring everything else together, giving me an instrument, a sample source, a keyboard controller, CV controller, etc all in one package.

In retrospect, I think that Jamuary has really focused me on what I need and what I don’t need, and has resulting in some real expenditure I wasn’t expecting, but I think at the end of the day it will be for the best.

[Dava]

It sounds like a sense of purpose has definitely come calling.
Wonderful stuff!

It’s as if intentional engagement with a smaller, limited goal (in this case, Jamuary), gives rise to an unintentional, greater sense of engagement that is without limits.

Be great to hear your release when it arrives.