How to organize demos and voice memos

Name it at the moment you make it, badly

The recording gets named once, and the only moment you know what it is, is the moment you stop playing. Ten seconds later you are onto something else; ten days later it is a timestamp and a mystery.

The name does not have to be good. It has to be typed. “dropped D thing”, “chorus that goes up”, “angry one” — all of these will find the file in two years. “New Recording 214” will not, and neither will “Idea 7”, because you will have eleven of them.

The failure mode worth designing against is not a bad name. It is the absence of one.

One folder per song, not per session

Session folders feel natural because that is how the day happened — you sat down on Tuesday and recorded three things. But you will never again go looking for Tuesday. You will go looking for the song.

So the folder is the song, and everything about that song lands in it: the voice memo it started as, the bounces, the lyric sheet, the reference track you kept comparing it to. A song that turns out to be two songs gets split later, which takes a minute. Reassembling a song from six session folders takes an afternoon.

Keep the idea and the take apart

A voice memo hummed into a phone at a bus stop is not an early version of the recording you made three months later. It is the thing the recording came from, and it is worth keeping separately, because it holds something the finished take usually loses.

The specific thing it holds is usually tempo and conviction. First passes are faster and more certain than anything you record once you know how the song goes. When a finished arrangement feels stiff and you cannot work out why, the original memo is the diagnosis.

Keep the bad takes

The take you disliked on the day is not reliably the worse take. You were listening for the mistake you had just made; you were not listening to the performance.

Storage is the only argument for deleting, and it is a weak one — a three-minute WAV is about thirty megabytes, so a hundred rejected takes is three gigabytes, which is less than one phone's worth of photos. Delete when you are out of room, not on the day you are annoyed.

Decide what promotes a memo to a project

Most ideas are ideas. A few become songs, and the difference is worth marking, because a list where everything is equally important is a list you stop opening.

Any rule works as long as it is a rule. Some that hold up:

You came back to it

The single most reliable signal. If you have opened it twice without meaning to, it has something.

It has two parts

A riff is a riff. A riff and something that follows it is a song trying to happen.

You played it to someone

You do not play people your bad ideas. The act of playing it is the judgement, already made.