Deleting projects that ive started coz im not feeling them

[Attunga Sails]

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.

Definitely good advice. I wish i had the guts to just delete a track that i'd been working on. I always find myself thinking "well i've already spent two hours on this track... i might as well see what i can do with it for another couple of hours... days... weeks...". Like mp3, i got this (misguided) feeling that i can turn anything into gold. So often i'll get stuck sinking giga-hours into projects that i'd then feel guilty deleting. Nip that in the bud early on. If it ain't singing after a couple of hours, count it as good practice, and flush that turd. Saving it just tempts you into returning to it. Although you should def save any neat sounds/patches/samples you come across along the way.

[photonal]

Definitely don't delete - there may be 'one bar' of greatness in there which could be inspiration for another track and so on. (That 'one bar' might be some drum part or sound design that sounds great but out of context with the rest of the track.)

I find having several tracks on the go is great too, 'cos you can switch between them and work on the ones which are tuned into your 'mood' at the time. Sometimes I'll rapid fire, and go through five current tracks one after the other making small edits/arrangement changes/sound edits etc.

Also, if you get the 'this isn't working' feeling, then just dump it and either move on to another track or call it a day for working on music and try again after taking a break from being creative.

Having said that - sometimes a track *is* just totally naff and taking up disk space - so delete those

[Klauser]

I keep a folder that I save interesting ideas to. Like if I start a track, work on it for a couple of hours and can't really get the feel of it by then, then I save under a descriptive name into this folder. Some stuff is just not worth saving, but I think as you produce longer and gain experience,'you get better at making the descision to keep it or bin it.

Sometimes I have a real lack of inspiration for creativeness, so I dive in the folder with all the interesting incomplete saves( I'm going to call them embryos ) and see if anything fruitful comes from it.

But disk space is soooooo cheap these days that it's not really an issue if you want to save everything you do. But I think saving everything might be counter productive. Maybe