After a break, as the work year kicked in, I did another five days of #Jamuary in a row. Again, the mode I’ve adopted is starting a patch in VCV Rack, and then tweaking the patch each day as I learn more about the given modules. If I this past week yielded one takeaway, it’s that I need to stop only thinking of patches as performances or compositions, and to also use them as source material within a DAW, such as Ableton, or even within Audacity, a multitrack editor. I do this on occasion, but I don’t focus on the approach enough. I’ll either push this patch a bit further, or move on to a new patch for the coming week.
▰ 19\31 — “Done Broke”: Breaking up the same sample actively into cues, having it play those cues random, and when it gets to a specific cue it repeats, a momentary centering, and then sets off in random mode again. Round and round.
▰ 20\31 — “Step Wide”: Another day with the same sample, building on the same patch, this time using one snippet on the 1, 2, and 4, and filling the 3 with a random bit from elsewhere in the source audio, always shorter than the main sample, so it repeats a bit and gets cut off sometimes. And on the 2, the main sample goes through a bit of distortion that’s always a little different from the previous time.
▰ 21\31 — “16 Stuff”: Same basic patch, pushed a little further, this time the sampling module replaced with a 16-step sequencer in which each step the sample is tweaked one way or another: pitch, volume, effect, etc.
▰ 22\31 — “Stride Gate”: Took a different approach this time, though still with the same sample and a sample player, but what happens is a square wave turns on and off the freeze effect, with the original audio passed through, and the mix set so if there’s freeze, that’s all you hear, and if there’s no freeze, you just hear the original. The alternation sets the pace, such as it is. This is all in VCV Rack.