According to Brian Eno, you should never delete even your most horrendous musical creations as you never know when they may come in handy.

Eno himself never deletes anything, with his logic behind keeping and working on his most tragic drafts is that they can’t really get any worse. Because of this, he’s sometimes able to work them into something completely different or even use just a part of a piece for another project.

• READ MORE: Brian Eno: “‘Why do we like music?’ is as interesting as ‘How did the universe start?’”

MusicTech attended a series of workshops from Eno ran by the School of Song earlier this year, where he advised participants to work on their crappy demos: Try to polish a turd,” he said. “I am probably one of the most prominent turd polishers in the business.”

Eno also confessed that he’s got thousands of song ideas that he’s collected over the years, and though you may need some strong organisational skills to keep hold of all your off-cuts, it’s a method that he believes can be really useful. He further explained, “I don’t ever let anything go out of play, the point about the archive is to keep all the saucepans on the stove… Sometimes I will give it a title like, ‘Possibly the shittest piece of music I’ve ever done.’”

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Eno is known for his unconventional and freeing approaches to making music – the ambient legend has previously shared that he loves to use gear in ways it wasn’t designed for: “Most equipment is invented to do an existing job faster, or cheaper, more cleanly, or more easily,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times. “What I like to do is to discover what you can do with it that isn’t historical – something that it wasn’t designed for, something new (I’m sure the inventors of early microphones didn’t anticipate that their tools would lead to totally new ways of singing, just as the inventors of multitrack recording probably didn’t imagine Bohemian Rhapsody).”

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