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I was telling someone I was teaching the other day about the long term dangers of using this/that/the other VST plug-ins or samples you’ve downloaded from somewhere or your “mate gave you” and I realised just what an important point this is, so I want to re-iterate it here.

With the turning of the century computers were just getting fast enough to do some really impressive things, internet speeds were getting fast enough to allow us to download decent sized programs, and hard drives big enough to take a whole bunch of samples. With that came an explosion of different home-spun VSTs, not to mention the thousands of user presets for programs like Reaktor. I know there was definitely a point where I was downloading all kinds of mad, interesting plug-ins that I just had to have. Likewise, I gradually built up a multi- gigabyte library of samples, most of which I’ve never used but I’ve had to keep just because there might be the odd project here and there that used some of them.

But there is something really important to consider in all this. Computer power, internet speed, and hard disk space have not stopped increasing. What this means in real terms to a lot of us is that you are highly likely to upgrade your computer maybe every 2-3 years, you will probably buy at least 2 new external hard drives in that time, and the way things have been going the last 3 or 4 years a lot of people are ditching PCs in favour of the now more affordable Macs.

So speaking from experience, if you’re planning to do this for a while, at some point you are going to have to migrate all your project files, VSTs, samples etc from one machine to another, to another, to another, via several external hard drives, possibly also from Windows to OSX. In my case there have been countless projects I’ve tried to load up down the line that used a certain obscure VST, or one that was PC only, or used a couple of samples that were in a pack I decided to ditch 3 years ago… and so on, so I just can’t easily load it up and hear it how it was meant to sound.

So the moral of the story is, give some serious thought to what you use and really think twice about whether you REALLY need those different VSTs, or samples, or even presets downloaded from somewhere – because you are also going to have to be sure that at least they are saved somewhere that will survive all the migrations you’ll probably go through over time.

I am now down to Ableton Live suite, NI Komplete 7, Waves Gold and Antares auto-tune. That’s pretty much it. That means when I get a new machine I only need to install those programs, copy over my projects folder and my sample folder and most projects will open.

Unfortunately it’s not always that simple – if I used Absynth 2 on an old project, unfortunately it doesn’t automatically load up Absynth 5 with the same preset – so even there it’s not perfect, but you can imagine how much worse it is when you have all kinds of other VSTs in the mix and you don’t even know where they came from.

These days there are so many great tools at our disposal, and if you learn to use what you have properly you’ll more often than not do just as well, probably even better to just make do with what you have.

Now I should add that this doesn’t mean don’t ever try anything new. But if you do, freeze/render the track and choose “collect all and save” from the file menu so you have it as a WAV/AIFF saved to the project.

And don’t assume because something’s old there isn’t potential to it. I just recently released a song where the lyrics were first written about 10 years ago and the production has gone through many incarnations, but the bulk of the groove that remains was also done several years ago. It didn’t take that long for any reason other than I just forgot about it for a while, came back to it every now and then and eventually made it ready for release. I’m not suggesting this is a good way to work for everyone, but I’m just pointing out that sometimes old projects are well worth reviving – hence the need to future proof your projects.