Unfinished Projects

Have you guys ever gone through your unfinished projects folder?

Its been almost 4 weeks of me going through a couple of hundred unfinished Cubase projects, which Ive now scaled down to roughly a "top 100" possible projects to someday finish

I have to say, on the one hand I was a bit taken back that I had that many unfinished projects because I never really counted them. On the other hand its pretty sad that all that time feels wasted... well, not all of it. A good portion of that was learning and what not... but still.

The weirdest thing was not recognizing some of the projects (e.g. I MADE THIS?) and totally forgetting I made some stuff (e.g. Holy{censored}! Thats actually pretty good!). The worst part was having to deal with projects that where completely unsalvageable due to missing plugins or hardware. I could still keep my MIDI data and replace some sounds but I didnt want to deal with the hassle and scrapped them. The best, it feels like an early spring cleaning ripe with possibilities... that will probably never see the light of day

I understand your pain, as I've walked in those shoes....

Since then as a personal rule I have a template that I use in excel that I save with the tracks that give me alot of information, efex or channel routings and notes for later.

In my home studio I typically sequence out side the box and record to the box. So in my case I need to import the midi and keep it in the sequence, but muted. That way if I need to change a particular track I just edit some midi and record again. If I sell something off and need a change I just find something that works in the place and record the whole track over.

cheers...

Hate that.

Yeah thats typically how I work as well. My only problem with some projects is when Im using a sampler. I would say about 50% of the tracks I chucked were tied in to my old Yamaha sampler (which I sold), the rest to Kontakt. For some typical sounds like drum hits its pretty easy to replace them with something else but for more phrase stuff that I no longer have in my sample archive, Im pretty much {censored} out of luck.

I was recently scrolling through the stored songs/patterns in my Motif to see what snippets I had been working on that haven't managed to morph into complete tracks.

There were a couple I don't remember making... and there were a few that I couldn't find the patches I intended to use on my outboard synths. I need to get into the habit of putting program changes in my tracks. Will any of them ever see the light of completion? Maybe, maybe not.