Today is Tuesday, the thirty-first day of #jamuary2023. This is it. One final jam. It is … over.
For today’s jam, I wanted to try something different and sort of come full-circle by combining the first and last instruments in a single piece. And so today, for your musical amusement (or horror) I am combining the Arturia Microfreak and the 1010Music nanabox lemondrop, along with a pile of other stuff.
I also thought it might be cool to combine the two using a stereo reverb as a “mixer” of sorts to create a kind of dreamy, smeary, moving mix. So, I ran the output of the lemondrop straight into one input on a Flamma FS02 Reverb, and the Microfreak through the Zoom G3n and into the other input, and then fed the stereo output of the reverb into the RC-3 looper.
The reality was that the reverb didn’t provide quite as much crossover as I’d expected, so the lemondrop came out pretty heavy on the left channel, and the Microfreak was appearing mostly on the right. But I forged ahead and made the underlying loop using a sustaining drone from the lemondrop and some other low-ish tones from the ‘freak.
Once that was done, I recorded that along with some live playing of the Microfreak into Ableton Live. The result was pretty awful, so I mucked about with a combination of Ableton’s audio Utility device and compressor, and then Izotope’s Ozone 9 to try to clean up the mess as best I could, applying EQ and working the imaging settings to rebalance things a bit. That was better, but things were still a little out of whack, so I went back and recorded a true stereo track of just the lemondrop playing some occasional higher frequency parts to help to balance things out a bit. Better, but still not great.
Conceptually, I do like this final #jamuary2023 jam. If I were to it again, there are definitely things I’d do differently. But not this day. It’s Jamuary, dagnabbit! You get the warts!
There will be more about the overall Jamuary2023 experience and my take-aways later. But not too much later, so stay tuned….
I hope you’re enjoying the music, and I also hope you’re enjoying the variety of music being made by others. Here, again, are the links to #jamuary2023 content on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook:
Jamuary2023 on YouTube
Jamuary2023 on Instagram
Jamuary2023 on Facebook