brettworks

If you compose music with a computer, eventually you’ll face the accumulation of what you’ve been doing over the years. Digital files, while invisible, add up, with only their names and dates as clues to how they might sound; you can’t be sure until you double-click, load, and play. Musical idea curating is periodically listening to your files to assess what you’ve done, get a sense of what’s promising and what isn’t, jog your memory, and survey an artistic landscape.

This landscape has a time dimension in that it encompasses past, present, and future you, which means that musical idea curating is simultaneously encountering, and being sympathetic to your musical history and its prospects. You listen to what you were trying to accomplish at the time, noticing in chords, melodies, beats, and sound design chances taken, mistakes made, and micromasteries that occasionally resulted. (Sometimes I’ll re-open intriguing-sounding effects to see how they worked.) Know that your curating can be hindsight-biased because it creates a sense that your musical experiments were predictable when they weren’t. Keep in mind that what sounds obvious today was once at the cutting edge of what you could make! As you listen, be sympathetic to how little past you knew compared to what present you knows. (This also applies outside of music.)

Listening to music files with a curator’s sense also anticipates a tomorrow when you might resume work on yesterday’s promising track ideas. (Along these lines, consider bouncing down promising ideas into quick mixes in a place where they can be easily re-found.) Finally, the question What’s promising? is at heart of curation. What’s promising is whatever you enjoy listening to–a mood, an unusual progression, a tensioned sound, a solid structure just needing some polish–and recognizing what has promise is the quickest way of distinguishing good stuff from fluff. In sum, musical idea curating finds the through-lines that connect your work over time. Chances are if past you heard an idea’s promise, and present you still hears it, future you may know just how to turn it into music.