Prompt: wire a song that evokes the feeling of being stranded — in a place, a thought, a situation
BPM: 99
Key: E major
Jamuary 2025 - Snake Game music generator with Volca FM Keys and NTS-1
Prompt: A song that evokes the feeling of being stranded. In this case I choose Snake Island…
The main aim is to generate semi-random musical phrases by moving the snake around.
The Volca FM gets notes by:
Horizontal movement plays a fixed “melody” in Dm which randomly changes each time the green square is eaten by the snake. Moving to the right plays the melody backwards.
Vertical movement switches octaves but in ¾ time, hence the generation of a “Larks Tongues In Aspic Part 2” vibe due to 8 vertical grid locations. i.e. ¾ ¾ 2/4
The Volca Keys gets notes the same way as the FM but the ases are flipped.
The NTS-1 gets notes by combining the the two axes.
Each time the food is eaten a new sequence is randomly generated.
The snake game and the MIDI notes are controlled by the Teensy 4.1 which is using the Host USB port to drive the Launchpad. The Volcas receive MIDI notes from the Teensy on the tx1 rx2 & tx3 serial ports.
I’m not trying to get the best score, and wouldn’t be that good at getting it anyway…
Stuck in my head today so this was fitting. Dreadbox Typhon for the echoey bass, Digitone II for the pad, arp, & keys, Minitaur for the pumping bass, & Digitakt II for the kick & high hat.
After watching Venus Theory’s video on liminal ambient and seeing how simple some of the arrangements were, I thought I would try my hand at that. Especially with today’s prompt, it seemed a little fitting. After zoning out for an hour building the set, I realized I really really missed the mark. So, this is my version of liminal ambient
I watched that as well, and IMO you missed the mark for the better!! Very cool jam
Day 23. Another quick one after work. My idea was to create forest like soundscape, but it’s not really sounding like a forest. Nothing special, but still enjoyed doing this. First time using P-6 sampler and I sampled my tin whistle. I also got new trimmer hats yesterday for S-1 and P-6. Helps a lot using these devices in dark.
Got stuck here for a while
A bit unexpected but very happy that I was able to add a new synth to the family today, hello Roland Gaia SH-01 and goodbye Roland RS-50 that was only collecting dust anyway.
Gave her a good spin right away and she didn’t leave us stranded!
I just realized that the op-z has a built in audio interface, you can record directly from it by just plugging the usb cable into the computer. That means, today’s jam is in stereo (wow)
jamuary.org 23 Jan 2025 Prompt: write a song that evokes the feeling of being stranded — in a place, a thought, a situation
BPM: 99
Key: E major
I’ve gone with more ‘record a jam’ rather than ‘write a song’…it is jamuary after all
continuing to enjoy these prompts although my brain may have transformed ‘stranded’ to ‘lost’…hopefully still a stranded vibe here.
fitting in preparing and recording a jam, snipping a decent section and posting every day is getting easier with practice. long live jamuary!!
I’ve been messing around with this cascading delay/reverb combo that I think sounds really cool. Anyway now my hand hurts from strumming so fast to make all these weird bow-like sounds: Jan 23
https://on.soundcloud.com/GRoKoZHXjiBrJg4CA
This is a shell of something possibly semi workable but it’s 2am here and I need my bed. Noodled around for about three hours without landing on anything that was really that stranded although I have a couple nice 8 and 16 chord progressions for later use. Changed signature to 7/4 as a middle finger to the whole exercise, then what’s here came together quite quickly. The guide track of big unarticulated block strings is still in there so that’ll be first for the sorting out shop when I revisit.
All of this is libraries from 10 year old Komplete, I even used their own built in reverbs. Nymphes does bass because it was just there and why not.
Sounded great. I really felt the isolation.
Evoke the feeling of being stranded is the prompt for day 23 of #jamuary2025. Using just the #synthstromdeluge
Another collaboration with a friend and band mate, ‘Stranded’ ft. Max Jensen on synth. Max brought over his Kurzweil PC4 workstation, and WOW, I am always impressed by that thing’s capabilities 256 voice polyphony, very deep sound design, per voice fx chains, 16 tracks, etc. Needless to say, we didn’t scratch the surface.
Made with:
Kurzweil PC 4
Keystep Pro
OP-XY
Erica Synths Dual FX
A synth sequence with some random interspersed sounds.
How’s everyone doing? Struggling a bit here and will be thoroughly ready for a break when January is over!
I was mostly messing with Hapax’s MIDI FX today and not really a fan of how it turned out… too random. The beginning kinda reminds me of a nintendo game, though.
Might be struggling but you’re still killing it!