Old floppy disks and data recovery

[tea for two]

In my yooof my playing was a whole lotta tighter in my timing. It's like a window into somebody else as if it was someone else playing.
Captured on floppy.
Nowadays I'm forever having to fix timing issues as I'm so sloppy.

[Tomás Mulcahy]

I'm with sonics here. The way that I see it, is if my old ideas were any good I'd still be able to remember them.

Think of it as a big notebook, except it's digital so you get to record more detail in the rhythm and assign a specific sound. All composers had notebooks. Yes, even Mozart had to write stuff down despite the myths!

I'm not really talking about recordings of performances. I'm talking about melodies, riffs, chord progressions that I did not have the tools to develop compositionally back then.

I much prefer forgetting them. It clears my mind of whatever was blocking the development. Usually an over attachment to some aspect such as a cliché, or playing technique, or unecessary complexity.

Very often, to "finish" the old idea, I either slow it down, or delete material, or make it less or more repetitive, or all of those depending.

Even just loading up the MIDI and using completely different sounds, because you don't have the originals, is a good development technique in itself.

[ManFromGlass]

I have found this too. Sometimes I think the brain is finally ready to finish that ancient tune/melody/snippet etc, and sometimes it does.
I don’t miss loading sounds from multiple floppies into a few 32Mb samplers.

[tacitus]

I often leave stuff unfinished but it’s still there, in my Sibelius folder. When I dig out one of these musical truffles I can usually make a pretty quick judgment of what to do with it. I can usually remember what I was after, and possibly find a way to finish or repurpose the snippet/chunk or whatever. Sometimes it changes, in the twinkling of an eye, to something I can use. Occasionally I splice pieces together to make the equivalent of a banana and smoked haddock loaf. You’d be just as nauseated by the sound of it as by the actual food I’ve imagined it as …

[FrankF]

Ooo arr oo arr, be not so hasty, Malvolio, for there are more things dreamt of...heaven...earth...philosophy, er, etc.

https://thecornishfishmonger.co.uk/blo ... ck-pudding

[tacitus]

Oo er, I was a bit hasty, wasn’t I? Merely wanted to give a flavour of how strange my music can be. Oh well, back to the quest for savoury meringues …