A Thousand Jams

"A Thousand Jams"
Song by Mike Shinoda
from the album Dropped Frames, Vol. 3
Working title:	ATS Style CoronaJam
Recorded:	April 2, 2020
Released:	September 18, 2020
Format:	Digital
Length:	2:53
Writer:	Mike Shinoda
Producer:	Mike Shinoda
Label:	Kenji Kobayashi Productions
Dropped Frames, Vol. 3 tracklist
Dream Fragment Sound Collector Dust Code No Delete Robot Yodel Vibe Train Mike's Gonna Mike Shoreline Goodbye Cow Genesis Supernova Sidechain Gang Overcast A Thousand Jams License To Waltz

"A Thousand Jams" is an unreleased instrumental track by Mike Shinoda made during his CoronaJams sessions in 2020. The track was teased on promotional artwork for Dropped Frames, Vol. 1 on Mike's official store.

Background

"A Thousand Jams" is a song by Mike Shinoda made during the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the global pandemic created by the COVID-19 coronavirus caused communities to quarantine at home. During this time, Mike Shinoda decided to start live streaming online and inviting fans to watch him create new instrumental music.

"A Thousand Jams" was made on April 2, 2020 by Mike under the working titles "ATS Style CoronaJam" and "4.2 A Thousand Jams" and streamed live to fans via Twitch. This is the oldest track date-wise on Dropped Frames, Vol. 3. It was one of the most-requested jams for Mike to release and was one of his most popular streams.

Mike said, "Hi guys, welcome to the A Thousand Suns demo. So I put a poll up for you guys on Twitch, I put a poll up and it was a face off between a demo in the style of A Thousand Suns or a 90s hip hop demo. And A Thousand Suns won, so that's what we're doing today."

He added, "Some of the sounds I'm using today are actually from the A Thousand Suns sessions, like we made tons and tons of sounds and I keep folders of all of this stuff. Some of the stuff is literally from that, so that'll help give us the sound. I said this before, like the other day I was saying the thing about A Thousand Suns that was really unique is that it was a lot of experiment. Whereas on Hybrid Theory and Meteora, we wrote almost a formula, we wrote a style for the records... combinations of certain things. Later when we got to our third record which was Minutes To Midnight, we started experimenting outside of that and saying, "Ok if that was the playbook, what could we do to completely get rid of that playbook and try something that would be surprising?" And we did that, we explored way outside of that and we did like one hundred and fifty demos. And eventually we reintroduced a couple of those things in order to bridge the gap. So that's how like, on our third record Minutes To Midnight, how "What I've Done" was made, for example. But for A Thousand Suns, it started as actually like a video game... we were going to do this video game thing and that went away, it just wasn't working out. After that it became its own concept album. So making it was like a lot of experimentation and a lot of happy accidents. So I'll try and find those things today but to be honest, they tended to be really weird... like plugging this into that, some weird sound would pop up. It's kind of like you can't make those things happen. We'll listen for happy accidents today.""

Gear-wise, he said, "Somebody made a suggestion that I could use some of the gear. One thing I wanted to show you, this is a classic 707 drum machine right there. But it was modded, this was one of the units I used on "When They Come For Me." This one was modded, as you can see, all of these plugs and stuff and lights and knobs here on this side, it's basically like circuits inside of this machine that aren't supposed to be touching each other, and pitch and things like that were added to this machine at some point in the mid-2000s at some point. I think this is like an 80's machine. And so, it can sound like the original drum machine, you could freak it a little bit and that's what we ended up doing on "When They Come For Me.""

When asked if some songs take longer than others to mix, he said, "I've got better at getting them ready at the end of the session. On these tracks, some of them took a while. "A Thousand Jams", I really did have to clean it up a lot to make it presentable. Some of them I barely touched at all. It just depends. Some of them have a good shape. I wouldn't look at any of them and say, "That's amazing." If I was to get detail-oriented on these mixes, I would probably change of a bunch of things. But because of the volume and getting them out to you guys, I'm not being precious about them. They are a good snapshot of what's happening on the channel."

Versions

Note: Only the date of the very first release of each version is listed.

Title	Album	Length	Recorded	Released	Notes
A Thousand Jams	Dropped Frames, Vol. 3	2:53	April 2, 2020	September 18, 2020

Gallery

• 

  "Vol. 3" Cover

• 

  YouTube Cover

• 

  Mike Shinoda Custom Drawing Cover

• 

  Spotify Playlist

• 

  CoronaJam Session (April 2, 2020 via Twitch)

• 

  CoronaJam Session (April 2, 2020 via Twitch)

Personnel

• Mike Shinoda

External Links

• A Thousand Jams (Official Audio): YouTube