Discarding Your Musical Past

[foosnark]

There are things I've thrown out or lost over time and wish I still had. There are other things I'm still keeping which I doubt I will never give a shit about.

Every once in a while I go back and listen to music I made 20+ years ago. I cringe a little at my less developed production skills and would do some things differently, but I also notice that I had some good ideas, and I can get a sense of how my tastes and techniques both changed and stayed the same over time. I wish that I still had my few even older pre-DAW recordings.

I also wish I still had my old journals I started writing in the 80s.

[vurt]

my musical past, i have a couple of old cassettes of my first bands, a couple of my early cuts ups, a few vinyl and cd bits i was involved with.
computer stuff, have none, due to hard drive fails over the years, now it all gets recorded straight to youtube, so i guess theres that.

[jancivil]

I've lost virtually all traces of my life, musical or personal, of what I'll call 'the before times', before any/everything I do happens on a computer. I'm kind of the opposite of a pack rat anyway. So whatever documentary evidence does exist of me doing anything is stored if not at Youtube on Google Drive, or possibly (I doubt it) poetry on a couple of Wordpress sites. There are one, maybe two things I regret losing from long ago. I did delete a couple of things fairly recently* that there are no passable copies of anywhere. (I saw that more or less all of what I'd committed to mp3 exist, stolen, in a number of places.) *: I figured with some distance 'this is bullshit'.

[VitaminD]

I still have every single song I have worked on, from the start in my mod tracker days, going on nearly 30 years back. Even my first horrible s3m track, which got eviscerated in 3rd party review.

It is great to go back and listen to young me and the ideas I was writing with the limitations I had then. In some ways I might have even been more creative then. I still have it all since it is all digital. And it is in formats I can mostly work on today. A source of ideas that are legally my own.

Much of it is awful though, some are legitimately interesting. But either way it is nice to hear how I've improved and some ways how I've just changed.

Just like I can look back and younger me at different stages of life and see how I've matured and grown over time.

I guess if you want to forget who you were and what made you into who you are, getting rid of the memories could perhaps benefit you. But I'd rather keep some of them around to remind me how long a road I've traveled to me becoming me. Good bad and ugly.

[ghettosynth]

A couple years ago having to move I really cleaned house and discarded 90% of my old crap musical and otherwise. Shoulda done it years ago honestly.

Liberating…

*of course, 2 yrs later and now I have a bunch more crap.

Right? In a past "digital" cleanup I realized that I didn't want to revisit the last decade of old projects and deleted gigabytes of project sources. This was a few years back now. I still have the final mixes of those albums, in fact, they're online backed up by someone else. But the liberating part was not thinking of them as projects to revisit or as source material for new work. I seldom do that, it's just not how I work and so I just let the sources go to stop the psychological load of past work.

[ghettosynth]

I guess if you want to forget who you were and what made you into who you are, getting rid of the memories could perhaps benefit you. But I'd rather keep some of them around to remind me how long a road I've traveled to me becoming me. Good bad and ugly.

That's a bit extreme. I have enough of a cross section of my music history in digital format. I don't need every bit of media that I've ever recorded. What you're describing, to me, sounds like an emotional justification for hoarding. I also don't tie my identify to my musical output to that extent. I can see how that may matter more to some musicians. In fact, some of my strongest memories, the ones that shaped my music journey, aren't captured on tape, the evidence is only in my mind or in my notes, so that's not my motivation.

[cryophonik]

I keep everything and I plan to put it all in some very ornate boxes with weird symbology all over them before I die so that, after the next apocalypse, a future civilization will discover our historical remains and my old crappy recordings will be revered as some holy artifacts that spawn new religions, more hate and war, and ultimately lead to another apocalyptic event. That seems pretty cool.

[ghettosynth]

I keep everything and I plan to put it all in some very ornate boxes with weird symbology all over them before I die so that, after the next apocalypse, a future civilization will discover our historical remains and my old crappy recordings will be revered as some holy artifacts that spawn new religions, more hate and war, and ultimately lead to another apocalyptic event. That seems pretty cool.

Yes, you will be the new Ancients of Mu Mu. Be sure to do that BEFORE you die. I would mark your death on the calendar if I were you.

[VitaminD]

I guess if you want to forget who you were and what made you into who you are, getting rid of the memories could perhaps benefit you. But I'd rather keep some of them around to remind me how long a road I've traveled to me becoming me. Good bad and ugly.

That's a bit extreme. I have enough of a cross section of my music history in digital format. I don't need every bit of media that I've ever recorded. What you're describing, to me, sounds like an emotional justification for hoarding. I also don't tie my identify to my musical output to that extent. I can see how that may matter more to some musicians. In fact, some of my strongest memories, the ones that shaped my music journey, aren't captured on tape, the evidence is only in my mind or in my notes, so that's not my motivation.

Extreme? No. Memories fade in time. Esp as you get much older our remembering can get fuzzy and we tend to remember things that werent there and forget things that were. Digital copies are greater for refreshing what really was there and reliving it, if that's your desire.

Keeping it doesn't take much, digitally. Data space is cheap. All my collected projects can probably fit on a 40 dollar thumbdrive. That's hardly breaking the bank or causing me undue trouble to keep in a drawer.

What is your motivation though in music? Do you not consider it an artistic form of you? At least to some degree? I find music is an extension of us each as a person. Music has a strong emotional essence and personality to it.

Not in an artsy fartsy way but really in mood and personality that tends to get out even when we maybe don't realize it. And it probably isn't lost on everyone listening. Little bits and pieces of each of us end up greatly affecting any art we create, be it drawing or paint, sculpture, or music. That probably adds to the uniqueness of each of our work.

Unless someone is working hard to create the most generic or formulaic songs, I think everyone's songs takes on the mood and personality or some traits of the creator. And, more so, the more genuine and honest the artist, the more this likely comes out in their art.

Even my worst songs sound like mine. You could probably listen to 10 different songs of mine, in different genres, and still identify the ones that are mine versus not more often than not. And I think that's probably true for each of us or at least most of us.

Anyways, I don't find it extreme to keep my old songs and projects anymore than I do someone keeping a shoebox filled with old photos or a large binder of images.

[ghettosynth]

I guess if you want to forget who you were and what made you into who you are, getting rid of the memories could perhaps benefit you. But I'd rather keep some of them around to remind me how long a road I've traveled to me becoming me. Good bad and ugly.

That's a bit extreme. I have enough of a cross section of my music history in digital format. I don't need every bit of media that I've ever recorded. What you're describing, to me, sounds like an emotional justification for hoarding. I also don't tie my identify to my musical output to that extent. I can see how that may matter more to some musicians. In fact, some of my strongest memories, the ones that shaped my music journey, aren't captured on tape, the evidence is only in my mind or in my notes, so that's not my motivation.

Extreme? No. Memories fade in time.

No, what I meant as extreme is the idea that it defines me so strongly. It really doesn't, not the song outputs. Memories fade, that's ok. I don't know when I'll forget the time I was spinning from the back of my truck at a free (temporary) autonomous zone party that I was involved in somewhere in the middle of the state. The local sheriffs came by and started asking who was in charge, since it was an (T)AZ party, we told them we didn't know, but to check down at the other end. They went down, they came back, they drove off, six or seven cop cars, the house music still blasting. About that time I put on Funkstar Deluxe's house remix of Marley's "Sun is Shining." and just as it emerged from the mix you hear "Sun is Shining" and in that moment the sun came up just a bit and I saw the shadows of a long row of party-kids dancing across the ridge on the other side of the road.

There's no video, no pictures, no recording of the mix. It's just a memory and one that means far more to me than recovering tapes of crap jam sessions or songs that I've long abandoned. When it fades, it fades. Until then, every time I pull that record from the crate, I remember that moment.

Keeping it doesn't take much, digitally.

No, processing it takes time and hassle, for little reward. You seem invested in projecting your view. I was asking how others felt, but, this is my decision. They are going in the trash. I don't care about keeping them or giving up the time to digitize them.

I'm only responding to you because it may give someone else permission to let go and not buy into the idea that you should, or even can, save every moment and relive them. I don't need that.

[Uncle E]

I keep everything and I plan to put it all in some very ornate boxes with weird symbology all over them before I die so that, after the next apocalypse, a future civilization will discover our historical remains and my old crappy recordings will be revered as some holy artifacts that spawn new religions, more hate and war, and ultimately lead to another apocalyptic event. That seems pretty cool.

"Hardware sounds better than plugins!" as the priest plunges his dagger into the heart of the enemy.

[justin3am]

I start with the idea that I should back up all of my old projects in case I need to return to them for some reason. Then I never return to anything. There was a time when I would keep OS backups along with project backups, so that I was sure the projects would open correctly.

Now I only back up client projects and only for 1 year. I do have .wav or .mp3 files for most of the completed music I've ever worked on. Lots of it is terrible but it's all on my FTP. There are things I'm sure I never listened to after uploading, lol.

[VitaminD]

I guess if you want to forget who you were and what made you into who you are, getting rid of the memories could perhaps benefit you. But I'd rather keep some of them around to remind me how long a road I've traveled to me becoming me. Good bad and ugly.

That's a bit extreme. I have enough of a cross section of my music history in digital format. I don't need every bit of media that I've ever recorded. What you're describing, to me, sounds like an emotional justification for hoarding. I also don't tie my identify to my musical output to that extent. I can see how that may matter more to some musicians. In fact, some of my strongest memories, the ones that shaped my music journey, aren't captured on tape, the evidence is only in my mind or in my notes, so that's not my motivation.

Extreme? No. Memories fade in time.

No, what I meant as extreme is the idea that it defines me so strongly. It really doesn't, not the song outputs. Memories fade, that's ok. I don't know when I'll forget the time I was spinning from the back of my truck at a free (temporary) autonomous zone party that I was involved in somewhere in the middle of the state. The local sheriffs came by and started asking who was in charge, since it was an (T)AZ party, we told them we didn't know, but to check down at the other end. They went down, they came back, they drove off, six or seven cop cars, the house music still blasting. About that time I put on Funkstar Deluxe's house remix of Marley's "Sun is Shining." and just as it emerged from the mix you hear "Sun is Shining" and in that moment the sun came up just a bit and I saw the shadows of a long row of party-kids dancing across the ridge on the other side of the road.

There's no video, no pictures, no recording of the mix. It's just a memory and one that means far more to me than recovering tapes of crap jam sessions or songs that I've long abandoned. When it fades, it fades. Until then, every time I pull that record from the crate, I remember that moment.

Keeping it doesn't take much, digitally.

No, processing it takes time and hassle, for little reward. You seem invested in projecting your view. I was asking how others felt, but, this is my decision. They are going in the trash. I don't care about keeping them or giving up the time to digitize them.

I'm only responding to you because it may give someone else permission to let go and not buy into the idea that you should, or even can, save every moment and relive them. I don't need that.

Well you did ask for opinions, no? I am sharing mine. So, yes, I'm invested in 'projecting' my view. I was under the impression you were asking for them...

Otherwise, were you simply asking for people to validate your own view? I don't relive every moment and playback every song. But I have them if I want to. And it takes very minimal resources to keep them so why not?

More so it isn't even about a specific memory tied to a specific song. It's more about having a body of work, even if it is in a hundred mostly unfinished tracks, that together expresses me as a person sonically. At least to some small degree. I also have found a few older music ideas I find interesting that I can now complete, because I've gained experience and skill that a younger me didn't possess at the initial time of writing. win-win

And, like I've mentioned, I can go back at any moment and pick out any project from the collection and listen to that different point in time and see a slice of my development. Which I find interesting. Even the really cringe-worthy ones (which there are several). Perhaps you don't and that's fine.

No one needs any of our permission to do what they feel is best for them. But I'm sharing what I feel is best for me, since you asked for personal opinions of our thoughts on the matter. There is mine.

[jancivil]

I start with the idea that I should back up all of my old projects in case I need to return to them for some reason. Then I never return to anything.

I'm still backing up Cubase and VE Pro project files of current work. There are two things I wish I had project files for from when I wasn't doing this, because 'this is so not the right snare sound for this thing, at all' or other ill-considered bits that re-EQing the two-file or that won't help.

Mostly I've grown out of being so precious.

[justin3am]

I start with the idea that I should back up all of my old projects in case I need to return to them for some reason. Then I never return to anything.

I'm still backing up Cubase and VE Pro project files of current work. There are two things I wish I had project files for from when I wasn't doing this, because 'this is so not the right snare sound for this thing, at all' or other ill-considered bits that re-EQing the two-file or that won't help.

Mostly I've grown out of being so precious.

I used to get a lot of anxiety about listening to older projects, exactly because of those kinds of thoughts. After years of not listening to old works, I don't have as much attention for the details or at least they aren't jumping out at me in the same way. I'm still mostly concerned about the act of creating and less about having a record of the work I did, so it doesn't bother me much that I don't listen to old material... but when I do, it's surprising sometimes. I'll be like "I did that?!"