Jamuary 1st
On the final day of 2021, I happened to see this post on r/synthesizers. Now, I’m familiar with Inktober and other similar month-long prompt lists for visual artists, but I’d never considered how such an experiment might translate to making music. I’ve dabbled in the past with creating a new song from scratch each week, and I’ve used Oblique Strategies to try to dislodge some speck of creativity from the crystallized mess that is my 21st century brain… I sit down at my MIDI controllers each day, and I fiddle with some knobs, but somehow I’d never considered how the approach of daily sketching might mirror regular music practice. All this is to say, Jamuary appeals to me.
A brief scroll through the hashtag on Instagram reveals a glut of analog equipment and myriad smooth jams. It also reveals that other participants do not necessarily take the prompts as their starting point. That’s fine, but I’ve learned that I need to constrain my options in some way; sitting down at a blank project in my chosen DAW (FLStudio) can be paralyzing. There are infinite ways to proceed, so many first steps… So I decided to use the prompts.
For day one, I vowed to use FLStudio’s step sequencer. I haven’t really messed with it since updating to 6.0, because the piano roll allows for much finer control—particularly over note length. Because I planned to write a melody in the step sequencer, I knew I needed to have a fairly low decay on the synth playing the lead. I opened up a 3xOsc and pulled a sample I’d isolated during a podcast editing session: it was a little burp that didn’t make it past my throat. The “length” and “sample start” knobs in the sample settings menu of the plugin allows one to pretty easily find put together a loop from a sample. I used this little burp loop as two of my three oscillators, and I detuned them slightly to get some phasing action. For my third oscillator, I chose a sine one octave up. I checked the 3xOsc with Image-Line’s tuner plugin, and it sounded great, so I locked in a simple ASDR envelope: no attack, 8 step delay.
After messing around with the step sequencer for a bit, I had a basic rhythmic melody. I was feeling a little weird getting out of my comfort zone, so for the next element I grabbed some gear I’m comfortable with. I put together a little kick drum patch on the Korg Monotron and recorded it into Edison. Then, I made another kick drum patch on the Stylophone Gen X-1 and recorded it. I edited these kicks into clean samples and rounded out the drum kit with some snares and hats sampled from a break in Electric Six’s “I Invented the Night.” Drums always benefit from compression, and Maximus is my go-to compressor plugin. A four-on-the-floor kick line with some embellishments fit nicely with my basic melody, so I moved on.
To fill out the sound and to further cement the sequenced sound of this jam, I wanted to use an arpeggiating synth. I opened another 3xOsc and did a supersaw with a square wave an octave down. Most (if not all) native Image-Line plugins have an arpeggiator section in the “miscellaneous functions” menu, and it can be very useful for imitating that analog sound. I set it to 2 steps and mapped the “gate” knob to my midi controller so I could tweak it on the fly. Then I slapped a Love Philter on the mixer track. Love Philter is a very powerful tool. It’s a bank of eight customizable filters which are controllable by an internal set of ASDR matrices which match the matrices Image-Line developed for their soft-synth Sytrus. Primarily, I use Love Philter to make loops for filter automation; one can easily build very complicated filters with this plugin.
After recording some chords for my arp synth and tapping in a couple alternate melodies, the track was mostly done. I threw some delay on the synths and a phaser on the kick line. I used the Stereo Shaper plugin on a few different mixer tracks to get my sonic space right and finally did some tweaks to EQ to get it just right. The lead melody needed some expression, so I decided to use 3xOsc internal LFO to control the pitch. By mapping the “amount” knob to my MIDI controller, I was able to add tremelo flourishes to the sequenced notes. I played through one last time, recording my knob tweaks as a separate automation track. Then, export!
