Week 1 of WeeklyBeats. This week is straight ahead dance music, about 30 bpm faster than 99% of the music I make. Which still makes it pretty chill for house or techno, heh. And I recorded my cat purring.
I lay out in the description what I was trying to do - overall what I'm trying for with this challenge is, after 30 years of releasing music as Jet Jaguar, make music that isn't bound by what I think I'm supposed to be doing.
Week 2 of WeeklyBeats. Even more upbeat dance music this time, kind of breaks.
The concept this week was to imagine a future Michaels band with me on beats a la Mouse On Mars and a friend with the same name doing vocals a la Mark E Smith, inspired by their album as Von Südenfed. In this hypothetical the music is for a club PA, not for home listening, so I worked on it being punchy, simple and energetic.
For week 3 I plan to go in a really different direction, away from having any fixed tempo or master clock.
Aims for this week Week 2 of trying to do things I don't normally do, I decided to: Channel a friend (another Michael, c.f. track name) who talked about doing a live reboot of the kind of thing Mouse on Mars and Mark E Smith did as Von Südenfed - don't just do pastiche, but write for a live PAGo even faster than last week - I started around 160, but came down to the 130s. 160 was too tempting to just do my usual 80bpm with double-time scatterings...Keep it punchy, minimal delay fx including reverbs, same goes for padsHave alternating A and B sections - I quite often have tracks evolve into what I hear as separate sections, but not in a classic A/B switch way. Two new techniques What I think of as the main lead is my first real go at hand-rolling an FM patch. I configured separate envelopes on the 4 operators. Some of these envelopes loop during the hold section, which creates the LFO kind of feeling. For Bitwig users, this is the OOTB FM-4 device with 4 x Segments modulators changing each operator's level. The Segments that changes speed with each note is achieved by sending an async LFO into a Sample and Hold set to hold rate + gate mode, so it picks a new value with each new note on. That Sample and Hold modulates the rate / length of time for 1 x Segments.I tried out a method of resynthesis that I think is called Hilbert transforms, on the guitar mute part you hear from the beginning. If this is recreating a sound with a sine wave, I swapped the sine for a wavetable and then cycle through the index of individual waveforms to make scronkiness (technical term). In the track I have about 30% original guitar samples + 70% this resynthesised sound. For Bitwig users, the linked video shows you how to build this in Bitwig's out of the box modular environment. meta about WeeklyBeats I almost quit immediately after week 1, wondering whether this is the best way to spend my time. By the end of the same day I was working on this track.If I want to do really new things for me, such as playing an instrument or singing, that will take way more than 1 week. So if I wanted to get good at something like that, I either have to put in the time in parallel with the time it takes to do WB or I have to accept sharing some really crap interim tracks here.The comments on last week were super kind and supportive - thank you!It's been nice to have people who know me say that the week 1 track doesn't sound like Jet Jaguar but does sound like me.
Week 3 of WeeklyBeats. WeeklyBeatless, more like... I tried making a piece of music with no regard for timing.
It's largely playing notes and improvising with the Sealegs emulation that Chris @ambientspace made and kindly gives away as a #Bitwig preset, although I then processed the recordings further. Lots of explanation on the page if you're interested.
I successfully resisted calling it "Mr. Rubato".
Aims for this week My one aim for this week was to make music without thinking about tempo, time signatures and without any kind of snapping or quantising to a grid. Like most folks using a DAW, I'm used to making music that (mostly) fits on to a grid, rhythmically. A track normally has one master tempo and time signature, at least at any given point in time and often if you are playing or programming any rhythmic material your software tidies things up by snapping events to, for example, 16th-notes. So I tried to do none of that and to not even look at the supposed tempo my DAW Bitwig forces me to set. The Process I hid the grid markers and disabled snapping in a project in Bitwig.I experimented with playing notes on a vibraphone sample into a fancy delay preset, AmbientSpace's emulation of the Intellijel Sealegs module, without running the clock in Bitwig. I recorded a couple of passes of this, playing different notes and tweaking the long, long delay tails so they don't have a steady tempo and glitchy distortion shows up.I trimmed bits of the above recordings that I liked, then loaded up a vocoder, and used these vibraphone echoes as the carrier. I dragged in a gentle field recording I made on the Japanese island of Teshima in 2019 and used this as the modulation source for the vocoder. I sent the vocoder into a convolution reverb, where the impulse response was a long recording of echoes inside a disused German radar dome (thanks Antony / Mugwood!). I bounced the results and layered them at two different octaves. Some EQ to try and deaden some high-pitched ringing. The final track opens with a version down an octave, and the second one comes in later. I flipped the stereo channels on one of them for interest's sake.I lined up another pass playing vibraphone into the Sealegs emulation, which became the second sound you hear in the track. This is basically untouched.I pitched that same vibraphone take up an octave, chopped out sections I liked, and made a montage with some parts playing in reverse, which comes in later in the track. I made this mono and then panned the results using an LFO (not synced to clock and with its speed cross-modulated by another LFO just to make it really not-on-the-grid).Going back to step 2, I replaced the vibraphone sample with a basic subtractive synth (Bitwig's Polymer) and played a sustained bass note into the Sealegs emulation. I recorded multiple passes of this with more live changes to the delay settings, and edited out the moments where I actually play the note, so what we're left with is more like a collage of only the echoes. I placed this around the time the higher vibraphone loops come in.I placed the raw Teshima recording from step 3 at the end of the track as a way to go out and trimmed it to the bit that I liked most. The end. 😀
Week 4 of WeeklyBeats, free to listen to and download if you like.
I'm trying to explore new things (for me) each week, this time I:
1. used synthetic sounds (no recording or sampling - until I forgot at the end, oops),
2. only use a step sequencer (Stepwise, like an old school drum machine interface, but in my software of choice #bitwig ), instead of either playing or writing notes in like sheet music, and
3. once again keep it relatively upbeat, compared to my usual sub-100bpm slow motion...
Although it kicks off all polymetric and a bit spiky, it settles into something more dance-y quickly.
The title is a bit of a silly joke on this being week 4 (not 3). It made sense at the time. Aims for this week Make something more upbeat than I would usually do (again, why not?)Use only synthesized sounds, no samples or field recordings (e.g. the crash cymbal is a mix of white noise and two synth tones, with further processing)Use only step sequencers (Bitwig's Stepwise device), no playing or editing sequences on the piano roll The last one was actually more complex than I had initially realised, because to create evolving patterns over time I had to use automation or modulation to change the state of the step sequencer. For example, Stepwise has a maximum of 16 steps and the 4-bar chord progression that comes in later in the track uses 16th notes, so I needed to somehow have the pattern evolve over 64 steps. Flagrant cheating I aimed for only synth sounds, but the second beat I introduce after the chords come in uses entirely acoustic drum kit samples. 🤷 RIP my ambitions.
Week 5 of WeeklyBeats, free to listen to and download if you like.
I'm trying to explore new things (for me) each week, this time I:
1. made and jammed with a live looper,
2. played ukulele (a bit)
3. made it dubby to pay respects to Sly Dunbar, RIP
That opening sound is a ukulele chord, perhaps unbelievably.
The first thing you hear in this track is a ukulele, believe it or not... Aims for this week Use my ukulele, which I can hardly play at allBuild a live looping setup and record something with no edits or additional processingMake it dubby, acknowledging Sly Dunbar who died in the week I was making this Process I configured something in the software I use, Bitwig, to allow me to record a loop and sync its playback to tempo. This runs into effects that I can play with live, including a second looper. I just played one chord on the ukulele and looped that at half speed, so it's down an octave from what I played. This is the first thing you hear and carries on for most of the track with live tweaks to the effects. I repeated this process with a single note, which I bent quite out of tune for better or worse. I made one edit this time around - I turned down the volume of one point where I turned up the resonance on a filter so high it made a feedback squeal. After this jamming, I assembled the rhythm section: a simple synth bass line, one bass drum, one rim shot (with some vinyl crackle pasted on top). I mirrored the ukulele chord on two synth patches, one playing short stabs into some echoes, one holding down the notes to create a quiet bed of sound that shows up in the second half of the track. That second patch really is quiet and is also down an octave so it's a bit lurky (technical term). I like there being something in the mix you might not even notice. And that's it!
Week 6 of WeeklyBeats, here’s an uptempo dance track with growly bass and blippy percussion. Plenty of process notes on my blog.
https://weeklybeats.com/jetjaguar/music/the-borzoi-in-the-bubble
Week 7 of WeeklyBeats, here’s a 5/4 dub (?) track. Plenty of process notes on my blog, I try not to be #Bitwig specific.
This week was a slog. What am I doing this for? etc.
https://nonwrestler.com/weeklybeats-2026-7-click-through-rates/
Week 8 of WeeklyBeats, here's a beatless track with ever-increasing distortion. Lots of process notes on my blog, mostly not #Bitwig specific.
Week 9 of WeeklyBeats, here's a murky, icy-cold techno track. Lots of process notes on my blog, mostly not #Bitwig specific.
Week 10 of WeeklyBeats, here's a shuffly downtempo groove that reminds me some of Afrobeat and a little of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters.
Free to listen to and/or download.
Plenty of process notes on my blog as usual, if you make music yourself and want to know what I did.
Michael U
#Digital ⚓️ #Vagabond 🦈