Future Michaels

By jetjaguar on January 6, 2026 8:17 pm

Week 2 of trying to do things I don't normally do, I decided to:

Channel a friend (another Michael, c.f. track name) who talked about doing a live reboot of the kind of thing Mouse on Mars and Mark E Smith did as Von Südenfed - don't just do pastiche, but write for a live PA
Go even faster than last week - I started around 160, but came down to the 130s. 160 was too tempting to just do my usual 80bpm with double-time scatterings...
Keep it punchy, minimal delay fx including reverbs, same goes for pads
Have alternating A and B sections - I quite often have tracks evolve into what I hear as separate sections, but not in a classic A/B switch way.

What I think of as the main lead is my first real go at hand-rolling an FM patch. I configured separate envelopes on the 4 operators. Some of these envelopes loop during the hold section, which creates the LFO kind of feeling. For Bitwig users, this is the OOTB FM-4 device with 4 x Segments modulators changing each operator's level. The Segments that changes speed with each note is achieved by sending an async LFO into a Sample and Hold set to hold rate + gate mode, so it picks a new value with each new note on. That Sample and Hold modulates the rate / length of time for 1 x Segments.
I tried out a method of resynthesis that I think is called Hilbert transforms, on the guitar mute part you hear from the beginning. If this is recreating a sound with a sine wave, I swapped the sine for a wavetable and then cycle through the index of individual waveforms to make scronkiness (technical term). In the track I have about 30% original guitar samples + 70% this resynthesised sound. For Bitwig users, the linked video shows you how to build this in Bitwig's out of the box modular environment.

I almost quit immediately after week 1, wondering whether this is the best way to spend my time. By the end of the same day I was working on this track.
If I want to do really new things for me, such as playing an instrument or singing, that will take way more than 1 week. So if I wanted to get good at something like that, I either have to put in the time in parallel with the time it takes to do WB or I have to accept sharing some really crap interim tracks here.
The comments on last week were super kind and supportive - thank you!
It's been nice to have people who know me say that the week 1 track doesn't sound like Jet Jaguar but does sound like me.