What is Jamnuary?
For the past two years, I have been hosting and participating in an annual songwriting challenge over at Seed to Stage. Each day for two weeks, all participants write a short piece of music - ideally under 60 seconds. There isn't a concrete expectation for the format of this music. The real goal is to simply put the time into your DAW and get creative; whether that means experimenting with songwriting, beat making or simply creating sound design experiments. It's really up to the individual musicians to create what they want and put in however much time they want or are able.
This exercise in simply creating something musical each day, whether you're a beginner or a more experienced producer, is an extremely potent creative act. I would urge anyone who is trying to step up their music production game to attempt this exercise at least once or twice a year. Not only is it a fantastic way to explore tools, sounds and new ways of working; but you may find the reaching a creative flow state consistently becomes easier over time. What starts as a low stakes exercise in creative exploration often turns into a project that you have trouble putting down. Keeping this material organized can also yield a lot of musical sketches - threads that can be woven into later projects that need fresh ideas or B-sections.
Activating and nourishing that creative neural circuit again and again makes it an easier part of yourself to tap into again and again. And at the end of the two weeks, you'll have a collection of starting points to come back to or turn into complete tracks and resources later.
Confront the Blank Canvas
Creativity is not unlike a muscle in this way - if you don't exercise, it atrophies over time. It may feel like standing up only to feel like your foot has fallen asleep when you sit down to create after a long absence. If you've worked yourself into a rut and haven't opened your DAW in a few months, you may find that the blank canvas syndrome hits pretty hard in those first few daily sessions. I'd wager that the blank canvas is the killer of a lot of blossoming producers - for whatever reason, early on in their musical journey, they walk away for a few months and feel like their starting from scratch again when they brush off the dust and get back to it eventually. Even as someone who has put years into making music, it still feels like this for me when life prevents me from getting back into Ableton for awhile. And it's absolutely paramount to push through this initial feeling of doubt and sluggishness if you haven't grappled with it before. In my experience there is a very clear period of feeling like I'm stuck perpetually 'warming up' for the first couple of days.
For this reason, this year I'll be quietly warming up and revisiting some expectation free jam sessions in Ableton in the days preceding any group event in January.
Think About Your Process,
This process of rapid prototyping a bunch of music in a short period of time is a perfect chance to examine your process and workflow. During the challenge, you can think about the parts of your creative process that feel the easiest and most laborious. Keep an eye out for the habitual roadblocks that you put in front of yourself. As you advance through the two weeks, it's a great time to try and make incremental tweaks to your process.
We can take this process a step further and actually commit to those incremental tweaks by saving them to Live's default set. Most of the time, I like starting new sets from a completely blank slate with nothing added. However, when I'm working through a two week challenge, one of the things I like to do is create a growing starting point using a combination of tools that I'd like to learn and elements that I thought were successful in previous days' sketches.
For example, before the beginning of last years' Seed to Stage Jamns competition, I knew that something I really wanted to spend time getting more familiar with was my new copy of Arturia Pigments. So before the competition started, I updated Live's default set to include Pigments in a single, armed channel that with a blank preset. The second that Live would open, all I had to do was start playing the keyboard and trying to feel out the chords and core tone that I wanted to start creating from. While this small change was only saving me a few seconds for the first few days, this was a moment of time that would be saved every day. One less crucial detail about the starting point that I'd have to spend time thinking about likely saved me an hour or more by the time my two week jam session had ballooned up to 31 days of the month.
Developing a Template Incrementally
After a week of using this starting point I had recognized two more devices that I couldn't stop myself from reaching for: Fors Opal FM Synth and Will Hatton's "Kilobyte Kit" minimalist drum rack. Opal was another device I had been looking for an excuse to spend some time learning. It's quite a deep device that is capable of producing an amazingly wide range of different sounds between the array of different devices within the complete instrument. A lot of days, I was able to find an awesome mix of tones for starting samples by clicking Opal's Randomize All button until something compelling happened. Hatton's Kilobyte kit was the perfect compliment to two main synths that were so versatile. The stark, clear, minimalism of the core tone of the drum kit was extremely easy to mix around and left lots of predictable space in the mix that could be occupied by Pigments and Opal. So both the Kilobyte Kit and Opal were saved to the default set as well after a few days.
If I was saving a minute or two each day by committing to learning Pigments, I was easily saving 10 or more minutes each day just by committing to a more fleshed out starting point in my default set. Having such a clearly defined starting point definitely made it easier to hit the ground running each day. There wasn't time wasted wondering if it was right - the mindset became "this is what I'm working with, don't second guess it."
Another fringe benefit to working this way I didn't feel until months later when I was wanting to develop these sketches into full blown tracks. Starting with the same instruments again and again made for a very streamlined process of mixing tracks together. The common drum k
Leave Your Expectations at the Door
Historically, I've been in the camp of people who set aside as much time as they can and each day try to outline at least an A and B part to a song. Getting an 8 or 16 bar loop finished in a day can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. My most recent release, "Hexadecimal" includes 16 tracks -10 of which started out as demos created during the Jamnuary 2022 event. The following January, what started as a warm up session led me to riding the momentum for a 31-day streak for Jamnuary 2023.
Listen to the Music that Inspires You
This one may seem obvious,
Stay Organized and Leave Behind Notes as You Create
Creating notes about the music that you create
