On various places through out the website you will see the term “Jamuary Challenge”. This explain what that is all about.
Late in December I joined Jay Hosking’s Discord discussion group. Jay is a composer, a musican, and so much more, that I have been following on Youtube for a long time. The focus of his music is on synthesizers, both standard and eurorack and the music is very engaging. Most of his videos give you some insight into which instrument the music is coming from and why it is being used. His Discord group is made of many people of diverse backgrounds but all with a strong interest in synthsizers.
In the last week of December I began seeing people, on the Discord group, mentioning and asking questions about the “Jamuary Challenge”. I discovered it was a challenge to all the members, to use the month of January to focus in on their music and synthsizer efforts and create something each day. The idea was to work on anything from creating a new sound, creating a new beat, learning things about a new synthsizer or exploring an old synthsizer, writing a small musical idea or writing a whole song. There were no limitations to small or to big, just the idea of creating something new each day.
I decided to try and do the challenge and because I had the time each day, I thought it would be interesting to create a song and to put it together with a video.
At this point in time ,my music studio was just beginning to be reorganized and rebuilt because I had decided to simplify and had just sold half of my collection of synths. The computer that was the center of recording side of the studio had also failed and I wasn’t sure how I was going to replace it. But on January 1st I started writing music with an old laptop and an old Roland A-90 midi controller ( I will be writing more about my synths in later posts) and I was able to create the first song and video for the challenge.
My studio skills are pretty good so the mechanics of assembling a song were not too difficult but some of the other things were a big challenge. First was the fact that I hadn’t created a video in years so I needed to relearn the software. I started with iMovie, which I soon discovered had a lot of limitations and workflow issues that didn’t work for me. I next tried Divinci Resolve, a free but very comprehensive video editing package. It seemed to work well at first but, probaly due to operator error, files would go missing and the program would crash. After loosing a couple of videos I had put many hours into ,I decided to try Final Cut Pro. At first I didn’t understand how they managed files so things got pretty confusing, but I have since worked that out. Final Cut has been around for a long time so there are plenty of Youtube videos where you can find pretty much everything you need to know about it.
On the music side of things, I have been composing songs for a long time but it is interesting that I seem to be more creative under pressure, so this challenge really pushed me and the ideas began to flow. Due to a lot of things happening in my life my creative side was becoming surpressed, but this challenge has challenge has changed everything. I decided to keep things simple, by keeping the number of instruments small and limiting the chord progressions both in length and variety. I decided to use a “live looping” method (more about this in a later post) to create most of the songs: 1. I find it to be an interesting way to develop ideas 2. If I do come up with a song I really like that it would be easier to recreate a live version of it for “performance” from the live looping files.
This whole process was difinately challenging. At the end of each day, as I was falling asleep, I would think of a theme for the next days song. Most nights some spark of an idea would ignite and give me direction for the next days song, other nights it was just a jumble of thoughts. What I noticed was, that those nights of jumbled thoughts often turned into the best ideas the next day.
At the end of the challenge, as I went back and listened to the songs, I discovered that I liked a lot of them. Because of the time constraints many of them were pretty far from perfect, but I think the basic ideas for many of the songs are solid.
I have been spending much of February creating this website to present these compositions both with and without the videos. I am going through each video and song and trying to improve the final piece. On top of that I am giving each “improved” piece a name.
I will also be putting up pieces outside of this challenge that show other pieces I have composed.
Note:
The pieces that are from the challenge will have a number at the end of the video title showing the day it was composed.
The full playlist, in the original form, is on Youtube located here:
Enjoy, more to come.
Les
