#jams
Feb 13, 2026
These three initial jams began as an attempt to emulate, with my new Arturia MiniBrute 2S, the classic Roland TB-303 sound associated with late 80s and 90s Acid House. I imagine all monophonic synthesizers with built-in sequencers go through this rite of passage when arriving into new hands.
It didn’t quite work. The MiniBrute 2S’s filter isn’t squelchy enough and no matter how you program them, slides range from inaudible to subtle. However, that didn’t mean I couldn’t use it like a 303. Many old-school acid tracks, including Phuture’s Acid Tracks that gave the genre its name, are extremely minimal. Get a bassline pattern going over a beat then start tweaking knobs to your liking. There really isn’t more to it than that.
So that’s what I did. These jams involve only the MiniBrute 2S, a few drum samples, and minimal effects.
Nonetheless, the recording process was tricky. I had to manually trigger the samples and effects on the computer, with my mouse. While it was a lot of fun in the moment, it was challenging to properly perform combinations of changes at the same time. Fortunately, I recorded the stems separately pre-effect, enabling me to fix timing issues in post.
I was so jazzed about this jam after recording it that I kept playing it back and felt extremely energized by it. Listening to it now over two years later, I’m not sure that anything really stands out that would merit this reaction, except for the very simple fact that this whole thing was new to me and was therefore very exciting. I was so happy to finally have the ability to produce dance music live, to have a direct and immediate impact on it in a way that I simply could not do in the DAW or did not feel incentivized to do.
Additionally, these jams with the MiniBrute 2S probably gave me my first taste of what one could do with filter resonance. It’s very playable!
This second jam also shows the power of the filter. In some parts it becomes its own voice overlaid on top of the oscillators — which all of a sudden makes a simple monophonic synthesizer sound not so simple and not so monophonic.
Resonance is the theme once again, but I guess that’s to be expected from a series of jams that started out with a 303 in mind. I particularly love the sequence from 6:30 - 7:10. I’m also a big fan of how the MiniBrute’s “Brute Factor” feedback control responds to resonance. It sort of acts like a filter of its own by crushing the resonance and creates another dimension to explore when doing sweeps. It’s also fun to end jams by using the feedback to distort the sound into a thick mush.