At the beginning of the year, I started thinking about working towards playing live on stage. I created a huge Ableton Project with a bunch of tracks and began figuring out what to automate and what to do live, trying to mix things better to sound good in a venue, setting up Instagram and starting to network with fellow musicians, etc., etc.
I basically turned my enjoyable music-making escape into an anxiety-filled job. Unsurprisingly, this killed all my mojo and I made no progress at all for a couple of months.
I would still like to work towards playing live, but I need to figure out how do so in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming. Until then, I decided to take a big step back and just make a fun little jam, which is what got me back into music in the first place.
For this one, the Digitakt is doing everything except the pad. All of the tonal sounds are from the Peak, with the bass, chords, and chord stab sampled into the Digitakt. Then the Peak is doing the pad live. Digitakt + Peak is an excellent combo.
I really like the rhythmic modulation on the pad. To me, that's where this jam really came alive. To do it, I have a bunch of trigless trigs on the Digitakt's MIDI channel sending mod wheel CC to the Peak. I can sequence those to be as rhythmic and interesting as I want. Then on the Peak, I use the mod matrix to control how much the mod wheel affects the filter frequency. That lets me dial in the amount of modulation in real time.
As always, the filter on the Peak sounds incredible.
B-roll footage was shot on bike trail through Interbay in Seattle.