2026_02
By hieroglitch on January 6, 2026 8:11 am
I really liked last week’s recording, so I dug back into the cutting room floor and found another section worth finishing.
For anyone new and curious about process, mine is simple: record → review → release.
Record
I work almost entirely with hardware — small Eurorack systems, sometimes a TB-03 and/or TR-06.
Everything gets recorded. Unexpected surprises can happen at any point. Example: IIIII, the December 2025 release, was the outcome of my second session with some new modules.
The signal chain always ends the same way:
hardware → Roland R-07 → headphones
I usually start from a patchless/default state. I have habits, sure, but starting fresh pushes things in new directions. Trying to recreate old patches either leads to better ideas or forces me to rethink what I did. I do take patch photos, but they’re intentionally annoying to dig through.
Review
On a good week, I’ll have a few recordings — anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours. If I start recording and it's going in a weird direction, I'll try to correct it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I keep the failures anyway; they might be useful later (or end up as samples).
If I can, I give myself a few days before listening back. Usually one or two recordings jump out — those become weekly beats candidates.
I bring them into Ableton, cut sections, and add light processing if needed. Most edits are about removing repetition or dead weight. Cuts often land on odd loop lengths (14 bars, for example). No theory behind it — weird timings help avoid everything feeling too predictable. And if a section works better in straight 4/4, I cut it in 4/4.
The R-07 can drift slightly, or I’ll forget to set BPM properly, so sometimes it’s a matter of zooming in and lining things up by hand.
Finally, the 16 MB weekly beats limit is great. Without it, everything would be 20 minutes long.
Release
Once it’s done, it goes up on weekly beats.
The following year, I go back through everything and decide what gets an official release. 2024 was strong (as was part of 2022), so I’m slowly rolling those out.
Final thoughts
“Done is better than perfect” is something I genuinely believe in. Weekly beats has been huge for breaking perfectionism — there’s no way I’d have made this much music without the deadlines. When I started, I’d just bought my first proper Eurorack setup, and weekly beats forced me to keep moving instead of overthinking.
If I can’t record in a given week, I revisit old material and see what still holds up. Often something does, and I just run it through the same edit/cut/process/release flow — still within the rules, since the track is finished that week.
If this was useful or interesting, let me know. Happy to go deeper, and I’d also love to hear how others approach their own workflow.
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