I spent quite a bit of time and energy earlier this year thinking about my studio routing, how to make best use of my patchbay and mixer – to get a fast and smooth workflow. I think the setup turned out pretty good. The only thing missing is putting in the time doing the work to learn the ins and outs in practise. Which is what makes this jam challenge very good for me. I’m patching a lot and I’m practising dub techniques such as routing feedback loops from my mixer to my echo etc. While I’m all fine with the theory part, there definitely is a lot of practise needed to get levels right and making everything sounding their best. I keep failing, in for me interesting ways.

This jam started with a simple melodic sequence sent from my Arturia Beatstep to the Microbrute synth. I tweaked some knobs, tweaked the echo and played the mixer. Recorded it all into Ableton. Added an 808-beat, a bass synth and some piano chords (which I doubled and reversed one copy). Some fx-automation and it’s a jam.

The feedback loop involving the echo is interesting. The pure amplitude part just means increased number of repeats. But if I turn up the spring reverb on the echo I get howling feedback – and turning up the chorus results in flanger-like spaceship sounds.