I finally got around to ripping and mixing (mostly just a little EQ) last weekend’s jam session.
At some point I’m going to actually try to livestream one of these instead of just recording them. Unfortunately my life is hectic enough now that I haven’t had time to sit down and plan any of them. I also haven’t had time to really study and learn how to use the Circuit to its fullest.
As for the overlay image I used for this video, I was playing around with some free AI generation stuff online and then used more ai upscaling to make it big enough to edit and play around with and add my own little glitches and scanlines to it.
Sorry for the radio silence for so long. I forgot to post that I was doing NaNoWrimo again this year, so I didn’t really have the time or energy to keep futzing with my setup for pretty much the entire month of November. All I really did was finally rearrange a few things once I got some longer MIDI and sound cables and a USB MIDI host (hiding under the edge of the desk, so you can’t se it) that allows me to use my USB MIDI keyboard to control some things, so I don’t have to do all of the playing of the Circuit Tracks and the Behringer Crave right there on the square pads of the Circuit. I still do a little bit, but I have options. And I can use the knobs on the keyboard to tweak something on one of the instruments that I’m not actively using on the Circuit, so that’s handy too. The MIDI host was a lot cheaper than trying to get an expensive MIDI keyboard to replace the perfectly good USB one that I bought like ten years ago to use with a DAW.
I’d been having SO much trouble getting this dang camera to work, but I think I finally got it now. And this spare laptop has about 3 times the processing power of my little old 10 year old laptop that I was trying to record on before. I still decided to go easy on it, and just record the straight audio and video with no visual border around it. In future jam sessions, I may just stream like this (if this laptop is even up for streaming and recording at the same time! I haven’t tried it yet) and then edit it to add a visual border, and to make the sound and video match up. There’s a tiny delay between the two, which is really obvious in some of the sections where I’m playing fast or staccato.
But hey, I’m getting back into the swing of doing music again... after a month of trying to write an entire freaking novel. (I’m actually pretty proud of how much I managed to do. This is the first year that I not only wrote every day, but wrote over the 1,667 word minimum every day. My lowest day was literally only 5 words over, and I never went over 4 thousand words a day. But I churned out about 68 thousand words and got halfway through the plot of this novel in 30 days.)
I’ll try to get back into the habit of doing a jam session at least every weekend, and if I can keep a regular schedule, I’ll probably stream it as well.
So I didn’t really like how that last jam session turned out.... so I did another one.
I should do that more often.
Anyway, I started with just my three keyboards and left out the drum and bass and the Behringer Crave. I left them on the settings they were on at the end of my last jam session. Noodled around for about two minutes, found a nice plucky sound I liked on the FM setting of the Yamaha CS Reface. Recorded a loop. Then ran and grabbed my laptop to record a new jam session.
No real story behind this one, just a jam session. I was tired and out of it when I made it, it took me a couple tries to really get the right intro. Once I did it went right along, though. As usual for my jam sessions, minimal editing. Just a some quick track edits and some light warble effects, reverb, and compression before rending a lossless file, then a quick pass with some volume and EQ mixing on that before rendering to an mp3 to upload here.
It was actually a little hard to play, I did something to my wrist today. No clue what, maybe I just slept on it wrong or something. Getting older does that. And I had to do some chores around the house, which didn’t help.
I don’t know what my posting schedule is going to be like for the next month. I’ve got two more days to decide if I’m going to try to do NaNoWriMo again this year, and if I do, I probably won’t have much time for this blog. We’ll see.
