I have been inspired to try and attempt to carry out the #jamuary2020 challenge after hearing about it in Brian Funk’s Brian Funk’s Music Production podcastwhich I listen to.

I don’t expect to produce anything earth-shattering but I am doing it to hopefully force myself to attempt something musical each day of January 2022. The hardest part for me is just turning up and actually doing something (which the lack of movement in this blog testifies to). So my goal with this exercise is to end up with something to show for each day of the month.

I want to try and do some sort of visual with each piece of music too. So this is definitely a steep learning curve for me as I have barely scratched the surface of any software that I can use in both music and video. I want to record my trials and tribulations on this blog as I go along as I feel that is almost as much a part of the overall process as actually producing the music.

I want to remain private as best I can with my internet endeavors so am producing this all as Memory Bug and a big part will also be setting up the channels where the music can be reached. So here goes:-

Started with absolutely nothing! No specific idea for this particular piece. 1st of January 2022 and a clean slate. Decided for some reason to try and film London which can be seen in the distance from my back garden. Didn’t want anything too long and filmed a couple of minutes.

I knew I wanted to work with the video and also fancied using Ableton Live as it may lend itself to knocking something together quickly (I also have Reaper that I play around with). The problem I discovered is that I only have Ableton Live Lite which does not cater for video. I noticed that I could have a trial version of Live 11 Suite for 90 days and decided to download that. (Maybe I should now stick to Ableton Live 11 Suite for the whole project so as to learn it better).

The trial version was installed with no problem but I found that I could not upload any video into it. This was rectified by installing the Haali Media Splitter onto my Laptop. Instructions from Ableton here.

Ok, that got the video into Ableton but I wanted to split it up a bit by inserting still/photo images into it at various points. I could not get any of these images uploaded into Ableton no matter what I tried! It’s happy with videos but still/photos (e.g. .jpeg) would not be entertained. I had a search on forums etc. and other people have this problem too with no specific answer seemingly found.

So, back to the drawing board. I imported my video into the MS Video Editor which comes as standard with Windows and did the changes there. I would have liked it to be maybe a little more versatile but it did the trick. I then removed the original video from Ableton and replaced it with the updated one.

I had grand plans of making the music tie in with various cuts on the video but that would have taken me a month of Sundays! So, just composed something that I felt fitted with the mood of the video, which I found foreboding due to the images chosen. To be honest, I had spent rather a lot of time on this already and I needed to cut my losses as I still had to sort out getting it online. A slowed-down vocal phrase and some strings would suffice for this piece!

So I had finished the piece as best I could in time permitting (the ending is crap). I then created the Memory Bug channel on YouTube and uploaded it. There was a bit of faffing about creating the channel but I muddled through, sorry I can’t be more specific.

So day one is done and thirty more to go!!! Also, no one has even looked at the video at the time of writing this but that is really not the point of it at all. I’m doing this to enjoy the process, learn something new and hopefully overcome obstacles as they appear.