This is sound a little bit like a self-help column right now, but: What originally started as an error can be an opportunity. Happy little accidents (learning from Bob Ross) can lead you beyond your original conception of a piece into something new, unexpected and possibly beautiful.

There even is a way to provoke “accidents”. Often I have made copy’n’paste errors that turned out to be useful developments. Now, I sometimes just move items around semi-randomly in my DAW’s timeline to see what happens if I combined stuff that originally was not supposed to go together.

Some examples

When doing the album “Tape Concerto“, I had the opportunity to work with two great trumpet players, my band mate Michael Bossen and a fantastic session player I found via Fiverr, Francisco Grillo, who both played their parts separately and send them to me. Both provided solos for the second movement and a originally had the plan to have them play one after the other. When I was arranging the tracks on my DAW’s timeline, I happened to unmute both of them at the same time and found that by mere coincidence, that last parts of both their solos matched up great, as if they had played together and traded lines.

When I was working on the closing piece on “The Song of the Machine“, I wanted to reprise a certain section in the second part and I copied the respective Midi items to where I wanted them to go. But I copied them to the wrong tracks and what was supposed to be a drum part was played by a Euphonium instead! The flute parts where played by strings and the Euphonium line was played by the sound of a flute’s keys. And it sounded great (with very little massaging). So it stayed like this: