64 Mg of Regrets
As I’m going through this and iterating on the table beats, trying to make little live electronic jams, I’m having to really learn the EP series from Teenage Engineering. One thing that helps a lot is deleting and not saving.
I saw a talk with Legowelt the other day and he was doing some live beats, and he said the delete button is your friend. That’s so true. No one wins from what the internet has taught us about piling up four-bar loops. No one wants to hear them, and especially when you don’t want to hear them ever again, you already know what the job is before you.
Nobody wants that. You don’t want to burden your hard drive. You don’t want to worry about things piling up. As you learn, with the exception of lightning striking—which doesn’t even really happen—you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball, which is learning.
I’ve found the best way to do that is factory resets. If not every other day, every day. Sometimes even a few times a day.
Here’s an example. I made a bunch of little loops for the EP series. Guess what—you fill that thing up fast, and it becomes unusable. After a few loaded you can’t even add a sample because there’s no room left on the hard drive, or whatever the temporary memory is. It’s 64 MB. You really have to watch it.
Basically, per project, you’ve got room for maybe one loop. I had an idea to make a bunch of one-bar acid lines from stings, but it fills the machine too fast. I’ve got the small KO. I’ve got to find a different way, which is all just part of the process.
So I didn’t just delete the project. I factory reset the machine and deleted all the loops. They’re unusable anyway. Maybe I’ll find a reason to do them again, but I don’t know. It sounds more like a Push 3 project or an SP-404 project to me, and I’m not working on that right now.
So I just deleted it. I’ve got it in the back of my mind, and if it ever comes up again, I can just recreate it. No problem. The world won’t end. I might deny future worlds a wild stallion-esque trove music on which to abase society on, but what are you gonna do?