I’ve decided to try participating in a challenge to make and upload a piece of music every week for a year. I talk about why on my WeeklyBeats profile page, and my main aim is to upload music I like that is different to my concept of what I write and release as Jet Jaguar.
Week 1 submission is called Dennis Soda and is pretty direct house music. That’s pretty different to start with, but I made a mental list for myself of things I commonly do and then tried to avoid doing them:
- 30+ BPM faster than I usually work
- Very little in the way of pads or sustained sounds
- Almost no delay fx or dub influences – there’s one part with delay on it, two sounds with reverb
- Focused on the body more than the brain, and
- Don’t evolve the track through textural / timbral changes.
On that last point, the exceptions are sometimes I send the drums into a phone-line amp emulation and the last stab sound that arrives in the track has some evolving pulse width that changes its timbre each time. Otherwise, all changes that happen over time are just different things coming and going, or changes to volume.
The track is named for the recordings of our cat Dennis purring and the sound of pouring soda over ice.