Month: February 2026

This is week 7 of posting a track for free over at WeeklyBeats, trying to do something a bit different from what I release as Jet Jaguar usually.

Aims for this week

• Try something not in 4/4 time (pretty common me thing, to be honest)
• Get something done (I had a bunch less time than usual)

Reckons

I added that second aim because this week was more of a slog than usual and I tried for nothing very ambitious.

I’m not very happy with the result, but the way the rules are structured for WeeklyBeats, where you have to start and finish a track within the week, I felt like it was better to cut my losses and call this done rather than either keep hacking at it or try a whole new second track. If I did start a second thing and then found I didn’t like it, I officially couldn’t re-use elements next week. Kind of a disincentive to toy around with more than one idea.

Process

As usual, I’m using the software Bitwig, but will indicate if I’m being specific.

I started with clicky percussion made from record crackle, that arrives after the intro. It’s sliced into individual pops/clicks. I grouped the slices into sounds that might work as kicks, snares, or hihats (basically just low, mid, high frequency sounds), then tweaked each group of sounds to make them work better for those functions.

I gave all of the percussion that ringing, metallic sound using two copies of a spectral reprocessing plugin, Unfiltered Audio’s SpecOps.

Dub echo effects on the percussion were an experiment using SnappySnap by Electric Smudge to morph between multiple presets within Valhalla’s ÜberMod, which is basically a delay plugin but tuned more towards choruses, flangers, and such. If you make music I’d really encourage you to go check out SnappySnap and understand what it does, because it’s really novel. I’m not sure if I’ll buy it, but it’s really unusual in a market of a million saturators, a million reverbs, a million sample-based pianos.

To meet my aim, I sequenced a rhythm in 5/4 time. I feel very comfortable in this time signature, most any release I’ve done in years has at least one track in 5 on it.

I created two bass parts: “housey bass” and “sine drop”. They’re both simple, hand-rolled sounds using Bitwig’s built-in synth Polymer. For the housey bass sequence I set a probability for whether some notes play each time, to add a little variation to a 4-bar phrase: some notes always play, others from memory I set the probability to about 60%.

I usually start with loops, but at this point I sketched out an arrangement and asked myself what else.

I created a pad sound, sitting on one chord (G7, anchoring us in good ol’ G mixolydian). For this one I sifted Bitwig presets for their built-in FM synth and tweaked one of those.

To fatten up the sound, I exported a bar of the pad and layered it twice, one and two octaves below the original. I trimmed each of these to a short loop that doesn’t fit into the 5/4 time signature, so the 3 pad layers move around each other. I grouped the exported, pitched-down layers together and sent them into a reverb to give them more stereo space and interest.

Next up I added dub-style short chord stabs, which open the track. I just duplicated the original pad track, edited the sequence, and tweaked the synth patch so the notes are very short. I decided to alternate G7 and Am7/G chords – if you don’t know the convention for that second chord, this means Am7 but the G is the lowest note: G, A, C, E instead of A, C, E, G. This makes sense to me when the chord change has to sit over the static pad. Keep the root the same to suggest less movement.

I put the stabs through a spectral splitter to make the swirling effect you can hear right at the start of the track. I can’t really explain this Bitwig effect, Freq Splitter, super easily. If you use Bitwig you know what it does. I am muting two of the four “bins” that Freq Splitter divides the sound into, and then an LFO that changes how many different frequency splits are routed into each of those bins. Swirly!

After more editing and tweaking of the arrangement, I dragged in a drum loop I had lying around, which unsurprisingly was originally in 4/4 and definitely isn’t a sample because that’s a breach of WeeklyBeats’ rules. 🤭 I chopped and repeated beats to make the rhythm 5/4, and plonked the results over the arrangement near the end of the track. I fed the beat into a high-pass filter, which takes out the low end, and I send it into a wash of echoes as the track nears the end. WavesFactory’s Trackspacer reads the frequencies of the crackle / click percussion and dynamically turns down those same frequencies in this drum loop.

This is week 6 of posting a track for free over at WeeklyBeats, trying to do something a bit different from what I usually put out in the world as Jet Jaguar.

Aims for this week

• Go faster again
• Use my Double Knot, a hardware synth
• Use distortion, which I hardly ever use

That’s it.

Process

I use the software Bitwig. I’ll try to describe my process for other music makers, without being too specific about Bitwig except in brackets.

I recorded an improvised patch on the Double Knot that was making bloopy, pitch-bent percussion tones, and chopped this up so they only happen every second bar. This is a kind of electronic tom sound you hear throughout, the very last sound in the track.

I duplicated the Double Knot recording and ran it through a granular delay, Unfiltered Audio’s SILO plugin. SILO pitches the grains up an octave and has high “masking” that basically reduces the probability sound actually makes it to your speakers.

I added some buzzing distortion on both Double Knot layers, then put them through separate delays to add stereo echoes that ping-pong in opposite directions. So one bounces to your left speaker, then to the right, etc. while the other bounces right first. (Bitwig users, the distortion is an FX Grid patch using the Dome filter to resynthesise the input signal, inspired by a very useful Tildesounds video.)

Once I’d got the Double Knot stuff bubbling away, I made an initial beat by repitching a kick drum at quite different pitches, to create not just the kicks but a snare that goes “bip” like a synthesised rim shot. I tuned the kick and kept the notes within a scale (B flat major). No, I didn’t try and figure out what the Double Knot was doing pitch-wise, I just went with what sounded OK.

I then sequenced the second, busier beat from samples of a live drum kit that I downloaded from a site that doesn’t seem to be online at the moment, Organic Drum Loops. I configured this beat so it changes pitch every 3 beats / dotted minim. (Bitwig users, a Steps modulator modulates the pitch of all of the Samplers in a Drum Machine.)

I sent both drum kits to a convolution reverb to give them a similar sense of space and put a dynamic EQ on the organic kit to filter out the low end when there’s a lot of low end in the first beat. (Bitwig users, just an EQ+ with an Audio Sidechain modulating the frequency of a low shelf. The Audio Sidechain is configured to only detect about 20-100 Hz.)

The angry bass came last, and is a custom-rolled patch from another Bitwig-related YouTube video (a tutorial for building a synth based on the Stargazer synth module). I timed the rise and fall of the sound so it grows during the first half of the track. I reduce the sample rate of the sound as the bass part exits the track so it crackles and fizzes into nothing.

I very quickly sequenced the track and went back and added a simple opening drum fill. I also added distortion to the live drum kit, bringing up both the mix between distorted vs. not, as well as the amount of distortion.

Only 4 months on, here’s some music I’ve been really enjoying recently.

Rita Revell – Folded Volume 33 (Nice Music Label)

As with almost all of what I listen to and write up here, this is an instrumental album that’s predominantly electronic. But beyond that I find it pretty hard to say something about. You might just find it another mellow electronic listen, I find it somehow both diverse and cohesive. There’s nothing here that, at least in the context, I could put a specific genre on, and I enjoy that about it. Some tracks have loops of what I’m sure is guitar, other things sound like the most lo-fi techno, others are like some lost soundtrack from decades past. Really intriguing as much as anything, and has stood up to repeated listens.

In Transit – In Transit (FELT)

If you’re into dance music you might know of 2562 or A Made Up Sound, older aliases of this same guy, Dave Huisman. I really enjoyed his two dancier EPs he dropped in 2025 under the alias ex_libris, but I’ve also found this album worth multiple spins. It’s also from 2025 and showed up on a bunch of end of year lists, but the tracks were apparently shelved for 10 years.

It’s sort of ambient, in that way that most definitely comes out of dance music: swirling synth pads, the textures of sampled records, occasional housey chords or trance-y gated sounds, and drum machine rhythms kind of broken down into (mostly) sparse fragments. And dub effects! Plenty of dub effects.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)

I enthused previously about Lia Kohl’s only 16-minute long, 16-track album and content-wise this previous album is pretty similar, even if structurally it’s a bit different (7 tracks about the length of pop or rock songs). This album really clicked for me on a relisten, about a year after its release. I now find it quite beautiful. Even the quite fierce buzz of the opening moments.

Tracks look like they are named after one or two field recordings (almost always machinery – don’t misinterpret “field” here) and Kohl builds on these with cello or synth, occasionally with a collaborator. So that opening track is just called “Tennis Court Light, Snow”, and guess what you get?

The basically untouched recordings and their musical complements work together so, so well. Like “Car Alarm, Turning Signal” starts predominantly with a cloud of instruments and then when an alarm starts up it just sound like another instrument in a slightly weird chamber ensemble. Good times!

Pablo Diserens & Ludwig Berger – Tracing Basalt in the Onsernone Valley (Forms of Minutiae)

More field recordings, but really different sounds, mostly focused on nature and maybe it’s the name that has me imagining pastoral scenes. “Basalt” in the title is a person, and if you click through on the above player and read the album notes there’s this whole story of who they were and how this relates to the album.

Unlike with Kohl’s really prosaic descriptions and apparently unprocessed recordings, I don’t really know what to make of any aspect of this album, from the titles and backstory through to trying to picture what’s actually happening in the audio. How much is processed? Initiated by someone? Added to with instruments? There are some of the latter later on in the album, but most tracks could just be field recordings, perhaps quite squashed and boosted to give a lot of presence to smaller sounds. Perhaps edited, timing-wise too, but never in an obvious way.

Jeremy Hyman – Low Air (self-released)

Maaaaybe saving the best for last, because I have been really, really enjoying this one.

A little bit in the territory of the In Transit record, this is definitely someone who makes dance music, but making more mellow stuff that is often without drums. The opening track has a kind of jazzy shuffle to it, and another 3 of the 8 tracks head in pretty clear housey directions, but the others are quite beautiful ambient synth noodles. And I should be clear that however strong the dance influences all tracks are very chilled out.

I’m tempted to bust out the “Balearic” word (too late) or even suggest it’s a throwback to when people used to say “ambient house” and mean it, about 35 years ago.

This week’s track is kind of a grubby dub thing, which is certainly not a massive stretch for me stylistically, but process-wise I tried something I haven’t done in a very long time. I played something live, off a ukulele (an ukulele, if you say it Hawaiian), and manipulated what I did live with no take backs. Of course I had a few practice runs, but still. More details on the page.

I’m still slightly ambivalent about the whole WeeklyBeats business, but having fun I guess.

I think from next week I’ll switch to writing up my process over here, and link from WeeklyBeats to this – at the moment I’m effectively doing the opposite, but it doesn’t make too much sense to write these blog posts that otherwise don’t say that much. It makes more sense to me to have these posts sit in the context of the other words I’m writing and other music I’m making.