Deleting projects that ive started coz im not feeling them

[Karldali]

Hi
I have not been on ableton long, but i have managed to get 1 track down from start to finish. It didnt take long just one days work, just kinda happened naturally like that, im told that thats a good sign.

Now my problem is that when i start a project, if after a few hours im not feeling it, i delete and start again. I was wondering if any one could point out any flaws in this method

[foxymethoxy]

while of course it is good practice at times to try to push a track out from 0:00 to the end, i think that it is also really important to be experimental. try rubbing different things together and eventually you'll get fire! get rid of the junk that doesn't work

[chrism]

I tend to not delete my projects, but they do end up sitting there forever. An idea I've had which you might try would be to still render out a fairly sparse version of any track you have even if you're not really feeling it is top class. You can always use it later as a drop in or some kind of filler transition beat. It may not stand on its own, but Live makes it pretty easy to stick it anywhere at anytime as spice.

[Tone Deft]

disc drives are pretty inexpensive, no real need to delete stuff. you might not use that stuff again but it can be helpful to look back at what you were doing.

keep at it, keep trying new techniques, keep searching for YOUR sound and YOUR technique. after a decade of this stuff I've got ~350 awful projects and half a dozen that I actually kinda like.

time, patience and persistence. first rule is to always trust your ears. second might be to lighten up and not be so hard on yourself. have fun, keep moving, keep cranking out turds until you lay a golden one, then it gets easier.

feel free to blatantly steal from your influences, it's perfectly fine to sound exactly like other artists, you can change your sound later. it's not like you've got the record label beating on your door to make an album ready for Rolling Stone to review. relax and have fun.

hth.

[hacktheplanet]

I still have some sets from 2006 in my "Livesets" folder. Haven't touched them since then, but I've definitely stolen ideas from them for other songs. Plus, after 5 years, it's cool to see how I've progressed with Live.

[Mr Man]

i will not save a shit session in live - meaning ideas that never materialised.

all other sessions that flow and lead to new ideas are saved. I started off just naming and saving to one folder, then dated folders full of random keystroke names!... but now I have alphabet folders - so 26 sessions per folder, simply named from a to z, with the occasionall b1, b2 etc. When I get to Z, I make a new folder naming by month/year like so (march 11). A few years to go before im on decade folders

works for me anyway

[rbmonosylabik]

What I do when not really feeling an idea after working on it for a while is save it for later deconstruction. That's why I've started saving my sessions with the key in the file name. A lot of the music I finish comes from getting stuck at some point, remembering I did something in another session that could fit, bringing it in and finding it works.

If you don't want to save sessions, because that can sometimes get messy, consider rendering stuff out as loops/samples with descriptive names.

[dhilsabeck]

I don't understand why anyone would delete any of their creative shit. It's like throwing away your finger paintings from kindergarten.

[seattletruth]

Yo I think that we all can relate sometimes. Sometimes after a few hours we think "meh", and then stop working on it... But a lot of the time I end up coming back to that same idea the next day or 2 later with a "fresh set of ears" and it gives me a new idea to take that "meh" idea into a totally new direction.

With Live it's so easy to completely morph your starting idea into something new, thanks to Session view.

So I would save your work and maybe try and use it for a jumping board later.. Remember, every song requires more than one "main idea" for it to be interesting.. So your main idea that you started with might actually turn into the counter-melody or something.

Anyway another thing is that you should try to finish as many songs as possible; even if they are rather shite. This is because the more practice you have finishing songs, the better your workflow will become in actually writing whole songs... Of course you dont have to show them to anybody. But, AS A BEGINNER, you should not always focus on making "masterpieces", but finishing song and looking at all your first songs as if they are just "practice"... That's not to say some gold won't come out of it, but stop thinking about it as trying to get a radio hit and just think of your first songs as learning experiences and try to finish as many as you can so you will become better at finishing songs... If you keep throwing away your songs you will just have practice in making half-hatched ideas...

That's my .02.

[Karldali]

I don't understand why anyone would delete any of their creative shit. It's like throwing away your finger paintings from kindergarten.

Are you trying to tell me that you have kept your finger paintings from kindergarten?

So i hear what alot of you are saying about keeping projects, but when i come back to them a few days later they just sound so bad that i dont feel like keeping them stashed away for nothing. I do however keep certain sounds that i like for future projects.

Thanks for all your input, ill try and get some of my tracks online soon so you can see what you think

safe

[theoriva]

mate, you should go back to them after a few mnths..not days.

move on and one day you'll brouse through one old sets and you'll be like: ooh, tha tsounds interesting and voila!

[jimmynitcher]

Keep everything - Live's browser allows you to mix and match everything from whole sets to tracks and single clips, this is a massive writing tool - make the most of it.

[dhilsabeck]

I don't understand why anyone would delete any of their creative shit. It's like throwing away your finger paintings from kindergarten.

Are you trying to tell me that you have kept your finger paintings from kindergarten?

No, but I totally wish that I had. I could sell those fuckers on ebay for a fortune.

But seriously, I have kept all of my musical projects simply for the reasons stated above: storage is cheap and you can revisit them months, or even years from now. At which point you can always either have a laugh and learn from pitfalls and "mistakes" you made or you can be thrilled that you kept something that didn't seem worth a shit at the time you made it.

[penepasta]

I really recommend not deleting anything. Personally, my whole creative process involves leaving projects alone while I let them stew in my brain for a while before revisiting. It might be different for you, but still... It's easy to just store them away someplace on your hard drive.

[mp3]

My advice is not to spend a few hours on anything that you don't believe is a surefire banger.

When i sit down to generate ideas, I spend no more than 20 minutes on each one, save, and move on. This is how I avoid the problem of spending hours trying to polish a turd. As a perfectionist, I have the tendency to want to think that every time I sit down I should be able to come up with something dope, but the reality is obviously otherwise. So this is my way of battling my tendency to linger on a track even if I know that, at best, its going to end up as a mediocre track.

On one hand, I generate a lot of ideas that I may never come back to, but on the other hand that "once-in-twenty-five-tries" masterpiece happens a lot more often.

When I circle back around to review and edit the tracks, I follow a similar process where no track gets more than 20 minutes, but after 2-3 iterations of this process, the best ones tend to float to the top of my psyche, and thus get more of my time.