Day 2: Sequence-by-Sequence (and the Crash That Doesn’t Matter)
Second day of #jamuary2026 here! The “a.m.” was smooth and painless. I wrote some chords yesterday. Tried the OP-1 and realized that was a bit of a weird chicken-out. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve got my setup together enough on that, so I’m gonna work on that later.
Anyway, came down and did my 6 o’clock power hour and came up with something pretty good. The mix is not there, but again: you gotta finish and release.
I went through the different parts I referenced a couple days ago—kind of that rigid synthwave song structure—and honestly that is helping a lot. I went sequence by sequence instead of making a master sequence and copying it seven times. That was easier.
There is a bug in the MPC / MPC3 (whatever the current version is right now) and I’m aware of it, so I save around it. The first time you copy a sequence and overwrite another sequence—which is the basis of my entire MPC workflow—it crashes. The good news is the save works. So as long as you know that and save first (and every time now it’s just automatic), it’s a non-issue for me. I create a new sequence for a new part, I definitely save, and I move on. It comes back up quickly. You’ve gotta work around it. (This is interesting because the initial boot of the MPC takes forever. Is it over a minute? I don’t know. I’ve never really timed it, but it’s a thing.)
Apart from that, nothing terribly groundbreaking this morning. I am realizing that I’m really overplaying leads, so I’ve got to simplify--break it down to just the basis of the melody—what’s the important part of what I’m trying to get across?
I did, in the B part, do a chord substitution for the last chord and that really worked emotionally. So I feel like working within this whole song form (and the restrictions) is really gonna work for me this month. (It’ll be interesting to see if I get bored with it though.)
I’m also going keep working on the OP-1 “go fast” setup—not song structure, but the form of how I work on it. That’s all about tape looping, with instruments, stuff out of time, atmospheric. And with the last OP-1 update, some really good stuff is happening in the cut-and-paste—when a loop “emerges” into another loop, it seems to be a lot smoother, less pops etc.
All in all, pretty happy with the way things are going. We’ll see how day three goes!