I make beats.


Jon Makes Beats

I’ll be playtesting my tabletop beatmaking game Super Beatmaker: Dungeon live on the channel today at 1 PM PST. This is a good opportunity to see how it’s progressed over the months. See you there!

youtube.com/live/1z3IFBoCXPw?is=GUiBAgNFCJwzddtZ

4 weeks ago | [YT] | 150

Jon Makes Beats

Hey, remember that tabletop roguelike for musicians I showed you earlier this year? You know, the one that musicians play in the studio while using their studio as the game board? Yeah, I’m still working on it.

It’s been a ton of work and has been dramatically transformed over dozens of incremental versions. Honestly that’s where most of my time has gone this year.

Because it’s kind of a new thing, a lot of that time has been spent discovering what a game like this can even be. As a result, I think the game has finally found its identity. The mechanics now all work well together to create constant emergent narrative within a music session.

The rest of development will be about refining the experience for the user. Because it’s meant to be played while making music, the goal is to limit the amount of overhead while maximizing the decision space and possible outcomes, all while keeping it analog. I think I underestimated how difficult that would be.

I’ll be making another video soon to show you all where it’s at. If you’re impatient, channel members can check out the current state and play it for themselves right now. Thanks for being patient, I’m think it’s going to be worth the wait!

Jon

1 month ago | [YT] | 488

Jon Makes Beats

Jon Makes Beats is now available in a show format on YouTube! I've always seen the channel as a consistent show, and so when YouTube launched the feature to create shows from playlists, I knew what had to be done. Here is the entirety of the channel, broken up into 9 chronological seasons. Enjoy! youtube.com/show/VLPLeXJ3lKblxNE?sbp=KgstVzQ1OUxTS…

2 months ago | [YT] | 627

Jon Makes Beats

Lo and behold, a week after the video where I talk about sample chopping in DAWs. Great job, Bitwig.

3 months ago | [YT] | 42

Jon Makes Beats

Do yourself a favor: turn off Stable Volume on videos. We spend a lot of time getting the audio right on these uploads just for the website to decide what should be loud or quiet. It demolishes creative intent, especially on audio-focused uploads. Thank you.

3 months ago | [YT] | 1,164

Jon Makes Beats

I'm fresh off recovering from an ear infection that took away my left ear's ability to hear anything for about a month or so. I'm celebrating the occasion with dropping a collection of 7 (mostly SP 1200 beats) that I made during that time. It's called One Good Ear and it's available for all channel members.

That situation wasn't making me want to get in front of a camera but now that's done, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming soon. Thanks for sticking with me.

4 months ago | [YT] | 943