Last week I was composing a new song and recording it in my Korg M3's sequencer (that's like a digital multi-track recorder for MIDI keyboards). I was nearly finished with the musical arrangement of the song -- I only needed to tighten up a few things and mix the levels a bit. It was late at night, however, and I was growing tired, so I saved my song sequence to the memory stick connected to my keyboard. As I always do, I then checked to make sure the newly-saved song would load back up properly, which it did, so feeling confident, I then deleted some earlier versions of the song from the memory stick. I shouldn't have done that (I don't usually do that, but I did that night.)
The next day I loaded up the only version of the song I had into the keyboard's sequencer and it seemed OK at first. And then about three-quarters of the way through, something very weird happened. It sounded like a broken record almost. So I reloaded my song again and the problem persisted. I began troubleshooting and tried to repair the broken song by editing it -- and getting frustrated with myself because I was well aware that my earlier versions were long gone. But no matter what I tried, I was unable to fix the problem, and my keyboard kept locking up forcing me to reboot it -- it takes about 2 minutes for the keyboard to boot up. After about five hours, I realised that I was never going to fix this song file.
There are lots of ways to deal with crap like this when it happens. You can cry. You can get angry. You can start over from scratch. You can forget about it.
Or you can ask for help.
I chose the latter. And I was glad I did. Because somebody I had never met and who lives over 3000 miles away from me, offered to help. And he did help. He managed to save the first three-quarters of my song. The ending was gone, but I had the bulk of the song and at least I didn't have to start entirely from scratch. Which is great because there were some things that I had played that I may never have been able to reproduce again. It goes like that sometimes.
Thanks to the kindness of one stranger, my life was made a bit easier last week. He didn't have to help, but he did. And I'm enormously grateful for that. So I would like to try to return the favour by sharing some of his musical works here. If you like what you hear, you can follow him on SoundCloud.
