I save it and come back to it years or months later. If it's still as good as I remember it being, I try to work on it again. But usually it's not as great as I thought it was while working on it, so I just delete it.

quote:

Originally posted by Sonic_c What do you guys do to pick it back up?

Move on, like MrJiveBoJingles, maybe look at it weeks, month or years later.

90% of my projects ends up like this. i dont mind though i had a good time.

Yeah i wonder why some projects seem great last night but then the morning after you dont even feel the groove any more?

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Processing a highly structured and complex pattern of sensory input as a unified percept of "music" is probably one of the most elaborate features of the human brain.....understanding how music is perceived and how it may elicit intense sensations is far from being understood.

I finish everything, every track teaches me something new and maybe i wont sign it but i still might play it out live or just use it for some other reason.

No need to call an unfinished track a fail.
Charlie May had pieces of Xpander for 5 years on his hard disk before he met Sasha and
asked him what to do with it. The rest is history.
You never know...

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quote:

Originally posted by Sonic_c Dont you hate it when you start a project and it just goes nowhere for days and in the end you give up thougherly miffed and feeling like you wasted a few days? What do you guys do to pick it back up?

this does suck and it happens mainly because you enjoy making the parts for it rather then putting the efforts into a compleat track,ie thinking ahead and i have leard the best way round it all is to have 4 or 5 tracks on the go this way stops you tring to hard on one tune and ending up being to fucked off with it to carry on making it.

and also stops you from using up all the ideas in one tune to

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles I save it and come back to it years or months later. If it's still as good as I remember it being, I try to work on it again. But usually it's not as great as I thought it was while working on it, so I just delete it.

Ditto. About every 4 or 5 months I go through all my old unfinished projects to remind myself what's in there and to delete the useless "WTF was I thinking?!" projects. It's kinda funny - I've got ideas in there from many years ago that I just can't bring myself to delete or do anything constructive with.

Maybe we should have a contest where you have to trade one of your "failures" with someone else's.

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I hold on to everything. As others have said, its good to go back and review older works to see if there was something there or if it isn't worth pursing. In many cases, I have a good base idea for a track, but due to lack of knowledge or experience at the time, did not have the skills to implement it properly.

My production partner sometimes comes by just to lay down simple ideas, on which I will then build full tracks. I have loads of these tracks sitting around, which are usually nothing more than a chord progression and a simple lead. In other cases I have a framework track basically fleshed out with arrangement and basic writing finished. This results in my having a LOT of projects on the disk, of which it is easier to determine status by color coding. I'll generally color code the project folders on my disk to indicate the state each project is in.

Uncolored: Idea.
Yellow: Has potential, work in progress.
Green: good track basically done, need to finalize.
Blue: Finished product.

It's good to get into the habit of coming back to things, especially if you work with other people. Remember that Sasha - XPander came about from a riff that had been laying around on a DAT for like 5 years. Charlie May was sitting in the studio with Sasha, and played it for him, to which Sasha programmed a simple beat and the track was born.

That being said, I also think it is important to know when to give up on an idea and move on.

I have one of those projects that means a lot to me. I still come back to it every once in a while but I haven't added anything new for three months.

But still, it's part of the learning process. A lot of things that I did in that project still inspires me in other projects.

Also, in one song I recently finished I burrowed the lead from one of those failed projects, just bounced it to wav and used it as it was, and it fit perfectly.

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Sebastian Zander - Hotel Chaplin
Sebastian Zander - Set Two [Electro/Tech House and Trance of some sort]
Paulo Da Costa - AVGN [Prog. House](128kbps])

quote:

Originally posted by Eric J Uncolored: Idea. Yellow: Has potential, work in progress. Green: good track basically done, need to finalize. Blue: Finished product.

i just keep everything unfinished in one folder.