Spooqs Space

Fall Jam Sesh 2025

Two Week Challenge and Creative Endurance Run

In preparation for a casual Jamn session and creative endurance run, I've set up a new template in Ableton Live beta v12.3, with the goal of producing a batch of new material with a similar style and sonic palette. My hope is that this project will be similar to my Jamnuary 2025 Mixtape and will convert easily to an EP worth of music that can be turned around and completed as a less polished mix tape-style release before the best parts are developed into a more polished LP later on.

My intention is also to gain insights into project templating for Jamnuary 2026 as well. In my experience, taking some time to do a light amount of framing and templating saves a lot of time languishing in indecisions while producing during these endurance runs. This time, I'd like to focus on producing a fairly similar sounding batch of music that is somewhat 'reigned in' with preexisting decisions about format, style and sound design. Whereas for Jamnuary 2026 I plan on working in a much looser set of creative constraints; focusing instead on locking in on a simple template with more of the mixing environment and technical toolset selected in advance. Throughout the project I have gone back and added a tweak, touch-up or time saving measure to the template before I start work

Inspiration for this Project

Project Goals

This year, I've found myself listening to fewer releases, and listening on repeat more often. I've been paying more attention to when I'm listening to music and how I am choosing what I want to hear based on what I'm doing in real life. Historically, my releases have been fairly ecclectic in tone, including tracks that are funky and busy, next to more pensive, minimal or driving tracks. My goal for awhile now is to make releases that seek to be engaging and exciting with their movement in tone and the arch and flow of the release from cover to cover. In contrast, this next project I'd like to have a more consistent and stationary tone; focusing 'painting a picture' moreso than 'telling a story'. This is something that I've always admired about the compositions of David Wise - with only a handful of chords and meaningful harmony, Wise is able to create a track that feels like it could loop forever without ever feeling old.

Art

The art for this project is from the coloring book "Cactus and Succulent Calm" by my friend Stephanie, AKA magic_crackers.

Template Breakdown

A big part of what makes this project tick is going back to the same predetermined sound font again and again. Some consideration went into picking voices and building the start to a dedicated template a few days before the event started. This would be iterated on with small additions and tweaks each day. Before starting the daily sketch, I'd take a few moments to refine the template file in small ways, save the updated version to a new file and then set it as the default set for Live to use on the next new daily exercise. Each day starts with the same channels for drums, bass and synths. The channels and busses are all organized the same way each time, including busses. Doing things this way ensure not only that the tracks will share a common core of instrumentation, organization and effects, but also drastically cut down on the amount of friction.

My Process

In keeping with the theme of minimizing friction on the project, creating the basic outline follows a similar workflow each day. The steps aren't always exactly in this order, but core group of initial steps helps to get the initial skeleton of a core idea out. I don't put forward that this is the 'best' way of doing things, just how I tackled the workflow this time.

Chords

I nearly always start with chord progressions. This time I even have a more clear pathway forward than usual with chord progressions, since my decisions here are leaning into the aforementioned 'David Wise sound': smooth voice leading, 7th and 9th extensions and avoiding big resolutions. These are tunes meant to have a bit of a hypnagogic, looping forever, 'video gamey' feel. There is meant to be more of a sensation of a 'space to vacation in' than a 'story to be told'. There are a few 'cheats' that I use here to make this stage take as little time as possible.

For the template/sound bank style of production used in this project, one of the most important elements in the template to have in place is a nice starter pad or keys that reflects the core style of the template and style of music to be made. This time I'm starting with Arturia's DX7

Drums, Bass and Syncopation

Once I have 4 to 8 bars of chords that I want to sketch out a first section with, I usually focus on developing a bit of syncopation between the drums, bass and main chord progression. I don't really have a preordained order for which, I just kind of feel it out on each track. Most of the time, I'll start with drums, and at least start a basic kick and snare pattern, and then find some places where then push/pull and interplay with the bass sounds nice. With most of my jam sessions and sketches, this is the part that I usually find myself wishing for more time for in the end. Getting properly locked in with a well syncopated groove is time consuming and sometimes feels a bit like untangling a knot between the drums, keys and bass. So in the interest of getting to all the voices in the set, this is the point that I most often first say to myself "I'll circle back to make this better later".