Always In Record

[Kanthos]

On Zircon's website, he's got a blog post talking about getting rid of writer's block. One thing he suggests is always having record mode enabled when you're playing an instrument in a writing session. I like the idea, and raised a followup question in a comment to the blog post, but didn't get a response (I know, Andy's a busy guy). So, I'll post it here. Thoughts, anyone?

A question about the Always In Record idea: how do you keep all the MIDI files organized, and how do you get them all easily exported from your DAW? I’d expect that if I played my keyboard for 20 minutes, I’d have a 20-minute-long MIDI track that I’d have to manually split up, export, categorize/organize into folders, etc. That’s worth the effort, but do you have any tips to make it a less cumbersome process?

[avaris]

Since you use Cubase you could always store those recorded performances in folder tracks? That would help save screen real estate. For each folder you could use the comments in Cubase to write down notes in terms of instruments used, tempo played at, and possible emotions you were feeling while writing. This might help to go back in the future and pull different pieces from each section. There def is no easy way to organize everything...

[Kanthos]

Hmm, I don't want to be tied to Cubase since most of the time, I'm at work or in transit listening to music. Not that I'm going to play my own clips over and over, but it's nice to be able to play them in the background while doing other work and let my subconscious get to work on it.

And I guess there's no good way around having a 20-minute-long MIDI track; I'm either stuck splitting it up at the end or making sure I'm recording separate MIDI events when I switch ideas as I play.

Maybe an alternative is to export both the MIDI and audio for each clip (the MIDI so I can have a generic "Recording" project with a few VSTs set up; I'd want the MIDI exported so that I could easily bring it into a new project) and tag the audio. I already use a comma-separated tag system in the comments field of all my music so I can group things into smart playlists easily; it wouldn't be hard to do something similar with the audio clips.

[Moseph]

I played around with recording improvisation sessions for a while, and the categorization thing was what finally killed it for me. If I'd had an idea and then decided to come back to it days later, I had to find it again. I decided it was more straightforward just to write down things I played that seemed like good ideas at the time.