hi yeah so context: 'changes' is a song i've been writing and producing for the past 3½ months. without giving too much about it away, it's basically my attempt at mixing progressive rock songwriting (most notably classic Yes (no it's not named after their song 'Changes' i don't really care about anything on 90125 (i just named it that because it's about change!! and the song has a lot of changes!! but it's a funny coincidence))) with hyperpop/hyperpunk production.

the preview really doesn't do it any justice; the full song currently has 4 parts, one of which is a 2 minute long instrumental intro prelude, and as of writing this post the full song is 7:36 in length.

at first, the project file had over 100 channels. i recorded so many different audio parts for it that Ableton Live would straight up run out of memory buffering all of them when i loaded up the project file (i'm using an old 32-bit version of Ableton, so it doesn't use more than 4GB RAM). i had to rename the audio folder so it'd load the project file without loading all the audio, then i painstakingly had to put all the audio back in piece by piece, after which i could consolidate some of the different takes into a few single audio clips.

that still wasn't enough, so at some point i ended up splitting it up into three different project files. normally i'd master stuff in the project files themselves, but since i'd now have to stitch these different takes together to assemble the final track, i now export them with the mastering chain off so i can stitch them together and master them in a separate fourth project file. and even that is annoying because one of the project files has a plugin that keeps breaking and i don't know which one it is so there's a 50% chance Ableton will just crash whenever i export audio from it.

and then there was that one time when i wanted to splice the channels from an entirely different unfinished song into the project file (this would later become the prelude to the song). trying to get that to work without Ableton running out of RAM was horrible; i'd have to drop in a channel, pray it wouldn't crash, then save it, one channel at a time for what were like at least 20-30 channels in total.

anyways thank you!! it's totally fine, i mean, asking here allows me to infodump about stuff like this which i couldn't do on Twitter. :D