An upside and downside of this month of daily jams is that I occasionally have to make music when I am just not feeling it. Today was one of those days. Listening back to the track a few hours later, I think it turned out all right. But, in the moment it didn’t feel good.
The upside of this commitment to daily jams, though, is that I am still creating. It is too easy sometimes to just not be in the mood to create. And creation (whether music, writing, drawing, etc.) is not always about some magical inspiration. Sometimes it is straight up work…practicing rudiments or scales is rarely fun, but the results from that sort of practice make the craft as a whole fun.
And so, with a jam I’m not in the mood for, I still did something valuable. I set up a new combination of gear–here it was the Circuit Mono Station running through the Zoia, paired with the PO-12–and I saw how they could work together to form a coherent jam. The Mono Station was two voices (though Oscillator 2 is somewhat limited by what is going on with Oscillator 1) and can hold it’s own as 2/3rds of an electronic power trio. The effects, especially adding delay, further thickened the sound. And the PO-12, for a $50 drum machine, this thing is solid.
All this is to say that sometimes making music is not fun, but it is almost always worth doing.
