How to Mine Your Old Voice Memos

Right. Last winter I was about a Bristol-to-Birmingham away from a gig and stuck on a writing block I'd been wearing for three weeks. Nothing new was coming. I pulled into the services, ordered the biggest tea on the menu, and instead of trying to write, I scrolled back through the voice memos on my phone. I found nineteen ideas I had recorded and completely forgotten. Three of them were the start of songs I would actually go on to finish.

Since then I have done this on purpose, once a month. It is the single most useful unglamorous thing I do, and nobody taught me to do it. Here is what I actually do.

The folder is the problem and the solution

Most musicians I know have a voice memos folder that has become a compost heap. Hundreds of clips, dated and nothing else, recorded between songs at soundcheck, in the van, in a kitchen at eleven at night, in the shower (the audio quality of those ones is something). The folder is full of gold, and also rubbish, and you cannot tell them apart without listening to the whole thing.

That is the work. Not writing. Listening.

The monthly mining session

Okay, here is the method, counted off in five practical moves so you can do this on a Tuesday.

1. Pick a session. Make it small. Forty-five minutes. Long enough to get through a chunk, short enough that you will actually do it. Put it in the calendar. Same day every month if you can. Mine is the first Sunday.

2. Listen in order, oldest first. Resist the temptation to jump around. Start at the back. The oldest memos have the advantage of distance: you cannot remember what you meant by them, so they sound, to you, the way they will sound to a stranger. That is the most honest ear you will ever have on your own work.

3. Give every memo three seconds of grace. Listen to the first three. If nothing happens in your gut by then, swipe on. Do not be polite to your own old ideas. You recorded them because of a feeling. If the feeling isn't there now, the song isn't there now.

4. Tag the keepers. Three buckets and that is it: a melody (a hook, a vocal line, a chord shape you liked), a lyric (a phrase, a title, an overheard line), or a sound (a texture, a feel, a thing that isn't really a song yet but might be the door to one). Rename the keepers. mel-stairwell-falling-figure. lyr-the-button-is-gone. snd-broken-piano-loop. The future you will thank present you for the seven extra seconds.

5. Archive the rest, don't delete. Move everything else into a folder called Archive and forget it exists. You will not miss any of it. And one day, in three years, you will go looking for a specific thing and find a different specific thing, and that is the whole point of the heap.

The Doreen test

My van is called Doreen. She is a long-suffering Renault Trafic, and she is also where I do all of my honest listening. Once I have the keepers tagged, I copy them onto the phone and play them through the van's speakers, with the engine on, while I am driving somewhere I would be going anyway.

The van is loud, the speakers are average, and the music is competing with the road. That is the point. An idea that holds up in that environment has real bones. An idea that needed the silent kitchen to sound good was never an idea... it was the kitchen.

An idea that holds up over road noise has real bones. An idea that needed a silent kitchen to sound good was never an idea.

What the mining is actually for

Two things, and they are equally important.

First, you save yourself from a blank page. Most weeks I do not need a fresh new idea. I need to find a half-idea I have already had and treat it the way you treat a half-pickled cabbage in the back of the fridge: it is a head start, not a thing to be ashamed of. The unfinished song from May 2024 is yours. It is not anybody else's. It is exactly the kind of thing only you would have made. Get it back.

Second, you teach yourself what you actually sound like. After a few months of monthly listening you start to notice your own tics. The interval you reach for. The phrase you keep almost saying. The rhythmic figure that you cannot leave alone. Those tics are your voice arriving early. The mining sessions are how you meet that voice on purpose, instead of by accident every couple of years.

What to do with the keepers

Anything kept is a problem you have already half-solved. So treat it that way. If the keeper is a melody, sit with a guitar and find the chords underneath it; if you want to test a shape fast, the chord builder at Undercover Zest will hand you plausible options in a few clicks. If the keeper is a lyric, write the next line, on paper, today; you can lean on RhymeForge for the rhymes you haven't landed yet. If the keeper is a sound, get it into a demo within a week, while you still remember what it was for.

And if you cannot decide what to do with one, leave it tagged and come back next month. The monthly cycle is the thing. Some memos get picked up and finished in May. Some sit in the keepers folder for a year and then suddenly become a chorus in August. Both count.

The mining session is the gig

Okay, last thing. Treat the mining session like you treat a gig. Turn up. Do the work. Leave the room better than you found it. You do not have to feel inspired. You have to listen, tag, archive, and finish the forty-five minutes.

That's it. Half your unfinished songs are already done, basically. They are sitting in a folder on your phone, named by date, waiting for somebody to come back. Be that person, once a month, on a Tuesday. The chair is wrong if you keep waiting for new ones.