VI: build archives, not expectations

how small ideas help you finish music

written by still fades

 
For years, whenever I sat down to write music, I told myself: “I’m going to write and record a new song.”

It put more pressure on me than I realised.

A better question is: “What am I capturing today?”

Not finishing. Not perfecting. Just putting something onto a recording – a melody, a texture, a recording, an idea.

Creating new musical ideas can be extremely daunting when you have nothing to go on. No inspiration to pull from or just a lack of motivation can derail us from doing what we love. I’ve had moments where I’ve not written a single piece of music over a few months, because the ideas or inspiration just wasn’t there, so I just didn’t bother. That’s until I changed my mindset from ‘I’m not feeling inspired’ to ‘What am I putting down today?’.

One of my favourite writers, J.R.R. Tolkien, spent decades building an enormous archive of stories, languages, maps, poems and fragments. Much of it was unfinished. In many ways, Tolkien’s masterpiece wasn’t a single book, it was an archive so rich that books could be drawn from it for decades afterwards. I find that so inspiring as a musician. Some of our sample packs began as small sketches, recordings and experiments that sat unused for months or years before becoming something larger. 

What is an archive?

I’ll refer to this idea as an “archive” throughout this article, but really it’s just a simple collection of recordings, sounds, and ideas you’ve made, kept in one place for quick access.

Think of it as something adjacent to your sample library, plugins, and instruments. Anything can go into it. A simple melody. A manipulated sample. A plugin preset you never develop further.

The point is to capture ideas as they happen and store them somewhere you can return to later. You can even add small notes about what you were thinking or feeling at the time. It often makes more sense in hindsight.

You don’t have to call it an archive or a diary. Think of it simply as a place to leave things behind for you to use later.

My point is that archiving can result in a huge library for you to pull from. It might not all be great, but that’s not really the point. If you’re not archiving ideas, you instantly risk putting more pressure on yourself to come up with something great on the spot. It took me a long time to learn this – I remember having days off work and thinking ‘Today, I’ll record a song!’, and when I turned up at my desk to make something, my mind was most of the time, completely blank. That in itself can yield results, but more often than not I came away frustrated (my wife will tell you, I was never really satisfied with my days off to write music). The pressure I placed on myself to come up with something was sometimes too much for me to handle – especially if I wasn’t inspired. These are the moments where an archive can become especially powerful.

Have you ever gone through your past DAW sessions or recordings you forgot about and thought ‘Ah I like that!’. Most of us have – and that is what archiving can do. Archiving shifts the goal from ‘write something amazing’ to ‘capture something real’. Chipping away at ideas every day not only builds up an archive, but it helps to increase your skills too. It’s quite simple really – the more we do something, the better we get at it.

Another writer, Ray Bradbury, wrote “Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.” And this is the point – quantity increases your skill level. So if you’re recording small ideas every day, you’ll get better at it. Imagine if a football player arrived at a match without any recent practice – we’d think it a little odd, and they’d most likely play very poorly. Musicians aren’t much different. If you haven’t made anything for weeks or months, when you next do, you’re effectively turning up to the match without practice (I learned this the hard way). Archiving keeps your creative muscles warm. Repeating processes make the processes themselves easier with time. 

How to Archive
I believe this is different for everyone, and I’m still finding my way with my own solutions, but here are some tips I’ve learned from both myself and others. The most important thing is just to record an idea once a day (or whatever you can manage) – be it a sung melody, a simple chord structure, editing a sample or a recording of a sound you really like. Think of it as a mini writing session with no pressure, or a quick practice. You could take 5 minutes out of your day, 15, an hour, the full day – whatever you like. The great thing about archiving is that it can now be done mostly anywhere, and can fit your day. How should you archive? It’s up to you, but my advice is to keep it simple. You could just open your DAW and record a few ideas – if you do, I recommend placing the DAW project in a dedicated ‘Archive’ folder (or ‘ideas’ – whatever you prefer to call this) so you can come back to them later, and they don’t clog up your ‘main’ projects folder.

You could simply use your phone – phones have countless ways to record audio and can be used at any time. The iPhone memo app is great for this – use the memo widget and it’s easy to lay down an idea at any time of the day, wherever you are.

Ableton Note has been a great source of ideation for myself – I use it on a daily basis, even if the ideas are rubbish. Because it instantly records everything you play, it makes it so easy to just play something in and leave it.

Although these are great solutions, they’re also fraught with distractions. It can be easy to get sidetracked, and I’ve come to believe that archiving is an important part of my day, so I minimise these if I can. Hardware samplers are great for this, if you have one available to you. I sometimes use the OP-1 Field to record ideas – I have 1 tape on the device dedicated to storing small recordings. Some of these recordings are used in sample packs, like Fragments and Kaleidoscopes – small ideas I had that I then resampled into something new. Our recent OP-1 Field pack ‘Loom‘, created by Akira Film Script, was crafted from an archive of recordings Ryan had made over the years and repurposed into presets – living proof that ideas eventually helped to form something tangible. 

A simple handheld recorder like the Zoom H1 can work too, or if you’re looking for something more luxurious, the Teenage Engineering TP-7 is a great tool for recording ideas every day, wherever you are. The ideas don’t have to be 100% musical – they can be field recordings, or just sounds you simply enjoy. 

If something records audio and allows you to play it back, it’ll work for this purpose – just get into the practice of doing it as much as you can. It’ll increase your skill in writing and performing music, listening for sounds, and it’ll also provide you with a crutch to rely on when you’re feeling uninspired. Archiving is a surprisingly powerful creative tool, and one that I think many musicians overlook.

The goal isn’t to create a masterpiece every day. The goal is to leave something behind to help ‘future you’.

A melody.

A chord progression.

A texture.

A field recording.

Over weeks, months and years those fragments become an archive. And when inspiration eventually disappears (as it always does) you won’t be starting from nothing. You’ll have a library of ideas waiting for you.

Just ask yourself one question:

What am I capturing today?