What is Jamuary?⌗

I know January (and Jamuary) ended 6 weeks ago but I wanted to reflect on the experience of jamming daily and write down my thoughts about it.

For those unfamiliar with Jamuary, the idea is to make and upload a recording of you jamming every day during the month of January. I mostly jammed on modular and semi-modular synthesizers and uploaded videos of these jams to Youtube, TikTok and Instagram. Here’s the youtube playlist of these jams.

Learning⌗

Firstly, it was a fantastic learning experience. I had to quickly pick up video editing skills with some newly installed software: DaVinci Resolve - I highly recommend this, the free version has been more than enough for my needs.

I had started putting together the modular synth in December. I wanted to learn my new instrument and jamming daily will force you to do that! I also made use of some of my less frequently used gear - the key was that whatever I chose had to be immediate because speed becomes important when you have a deadline every day! Semi-modular gear (i.e. works without any patch cables but you can override the defaults by patching) and simple sequencers such as the Korg SQ-1 were great for quickly getting results.

Fighting Perfectionism⌗

Jamuary was a great counter to my perfectionist tendancies. Every day I needed to get something, anything released. I had to work quickly, I had to get a take that was “good enough” and post it flaws and all. I had to try new ideas and make them work or ruthlessly reject them with enough time to try something else. I’m not a huge fan of punk rock music but I am a fan of the ethos of punk rockers: do it yourself and put your art out there in the world.

By showing my work daily I was able to start building a small audience on social media. One dynamic I found fascinating was that the jams I thought were weaker were still well received by my viewers. People appreciated the music, even if I when I had doubts. Shows how much the perfectionist part of my brain actually knows!

I have some older jams I recoreded and never uploaded and the success of Jamuary motivates me to finish the video editing and upload these.

Creativity⌗

The month was a huge fuel to my creativity. I used some prompts from the official site but mostly I tried out my own ideas. I made a to do list that I used to save ideas for future jams. Say if I got an idea during the workday or I already committed to a different jam that day I would note it down for later. Even after making 19 jams I still have a dozen ideas waiting for me to try out.

Problems Encountered⌗

Astute readers will notice that I only made 19 jams but there are 31 days in the month. I missed a couple of days in the first 3 weeks. Wednesday and Thursday were the days I had the least time for jamming. I did still play and work on jams daily but a couple of jams started on Wednesday were finished and posted the next day. As for the last 10 days of the month, all I can say is that “shit happens”. Our master bedroom needs repairs so I had to pack up the studio/office/guest bedroom where I had been making jams and use that as our temporary master bedroom. There’s a joke about “bedroom producers” in here somewhere.

I think there were a couple of times where an idea wasn’t turning out how I imagined and I was too slow to discard it or modify it and try again. I’d like to be quicker with rejecting things that don’t work when in jamming mode.

Future Work⌗

Where to from here? I’m hoping some of my jams can later become the start of finished songs. Either as ideas I can come back to, develop and re-record or by using the recordings directly for sections of songs, similar to the process used by James Blake on his album Playing Robots Into Heaven. Blake recorded over 200 jams with his modular synth, deleted 140 then used some of his favorites from the remaining as stems or sections of songs.

I’m hoping to do Jamuary again in 2025. One thing I would have liked is to collaborate with other musicians for some of my jams. With most of my free time in January taken up by jamming I’ll need to plan ahead and schedule these sessions in December. I’d like to try using guitar in more jams next year, and experiment with incorporating a looper pedal as a way to layer up different sounds to build a jam.

Thanks to my wife and kids for allowing me to spend 1-4 hours daily on jams during January.