Just deleted 11 years worth of songs.

[crimsonwarlock]

I have several 30+ years old tracks that I'm eager to redo with the tools I have now

[MrFigg]

I have several 30+ years old tracks that I'm eager to redo with the tools I have now

I extracted a vocal from a 4-track tape my friend sang on 30 or so years ago. I then took her vocal and sync matched it in Reason then changed it from the original blues song it was into something trip-hop. Was fun.

[bxbrkrz]

The memory of the existence of your deleted songs will live forever, thanks to this thread.

[avasopht]

One good way to make use of your old music is to bounce the separates and then sell them as a loop library.

You'll find all least a dozen or so suckers to pass them on to.

[Creativemind]

As I've gotten older I have often just played and not recorded (breaking my "always record" rule!) and just enjoyed the moment for what it was (even when it was sounding pretty awesome I never regretted not recording - and that's BIG for me!).
But my song sketches are like a personal diary. Not something to publish, but something to go back through from time to time to see how much I've grown. If I find a "keeper" that's just icing on the cake IMO, but mostly I just reminisce and remember things that were going on in my life at that time. But from time to time one of those songs makes it to an actual release!

I relate to this on so many levels!!! That's why I would like reason to have a functionality where it would record a buffer of midi data of the track you have selected on memory. If that was something interesting, you woud press some button and reason would recover those bits and place it on the track at cursor. I think there is a daw that does this with midi (might it be Cubase?), but i don't remember which! This is a great feature because if you're always recording, at some point you forget, so you're "not" recording. If you're not recording... Emotionally and psychologically there's not the self-conscious axe of error
lurking around!!

Yeah it's called Retrospective Recording. One of the few missing feature's of Reaper. Cubase has it for both audio and midi like Pro Tools Selig pointed out earlier on in the thread. FL Studio has it just for midi called Dump To Midi, well, unless an audio one has been added to it in the past 3 years.

As for your deletion of projects, it has made me think, I must go through some of my (probably 500) old projects and delete the 10% that are really really crap. I wouldn't do it with half decent ones, these ones will be dire lol!

[dvdrtldg]

I don't want to delete my old sessions. But I would love someone to go through them and do some renaming, so I'm not faced with a hard drive full long-forgotten files from 2010 with titles like "thor squelch groove 07a"

[raymondh]

Just started the first new song since the delete. Feeling good .

Nice one!

You do realise though when you become rich and famous, you now won't have all your old stuff to cobble together for the 'cutting room floor' limited edition release

I do get where you're coming from. I have dozens of song starters. A while ago I thought I'd organise them into "WIP", "Promising" and "Junk" folders. After spending time sorting them, I still never went back to do anything with them haha. I agree with the other posters on keeping stuff for collaboration, revisiting ideas etc but equally get where you're coming from, cleaning up can be cathartic!

Good luck with your refresh and future music!

[dakta]

Since my ideas/songs are not particularly good (or at least sound professional) half the fun is experimenting, the other half is in comparing old with new

I have accumulated loads of files and folders, as we speak im sifting through it as I almost habitually do.

One thing I do note, my newer projects almost always stem from the old and up becoming their own through use of the edit followed by 'save as' capability. I once quipped that I've probably already written to some degree everything i ever will. Some of my new sounds nothing like the old it came from even in genre terms.

I couldn't to it myself, which is why its on disk and cloud and another cloud and another disk

[wendylou]

[raymondh]

[Yonatan]

Sounds like Mandala approach to audio work.
Something liberating. I am not there yet, I go through them one by one. Some are rubbish, but here and there one get positively surprised. But ideas seem to reproduce themself so who knows you will find yourself recreating many of lost works without even knowing it.

[Aosta]

I have an insane amount of unfinished song files but instead of deleting old stuff I will go in there, clear any midi info in the sequencer/patterns and play with the instruments left in the rack..my thinking is that the sounds there must have been good so I will make another totally different track using the same stuff.
This may well be why I have so many song files in the first place

[DaveyG]

I have an insane amount of unfinished song files but instead of deleting old stuff I will go in there, clear any midi info in the sequencer/patterns and play with the instruments left in the rack..my thinking is that the sounds there must have been good so I will make another totally different track using the same stuff.
This may well be why I have so many song files in the first place

I'm kinda the opposite with many of my song sketches. I try to get the chords and melody down without worrying about what sounds I'm using so often just a crappy sampled piano or guitar and a generic bass. I've probably still got the template I made for Reason years ago which is just an NNXT piano, a Subtractor bass and a Dr Rex loaded with boring, standard drum patterns.

There are exceptions where I audition a new instrument and one of the presets catches my ear but those tracks are the ones that usually get stuck as an 8/16 bar loop.

[demt]

I got a small hardrive 4 50 quid and tx them accross