How a table of beat ideas became VibeVaultPro

I’ve always liked spreadsheets. We used them a lot when I was in the Navy, so putting information into rows and columns was familiar to me.

When I started getting five or ten beat ideas at a time from ChatGPT, it was easier to have them in a table. I could look through the ideas and keep them together instead of leaving them scattered through a conversation.

For me, a beat idea is a starting point for a session. A mood, a tempo, a key, some sounds, and a direction to try. I still have to take it into Ableton and hear what works. Some parts might stay. Some might change. The idea gives me somewhere to begin.

The collection kept growing

I started collecting a lot of these ideas and thought I should track them. It made sense to move to Notion and use a database.

Notion helps with my ADHD. But I also get distracted by templates and setups. I’d be working on the system I was supposed to use to keep track of the work.

The next step was to create an app that did everything I needed. That became VibeVaultPro.

A place for the ideas and the work

Now I can keep the ideas, notes, reference tracks, tasks, and studio sessions together. I can try an idea, write down what I heard, change a part, and come back to it.

The 3-Beat Rotation is a big part of that. Those are the beats I’ve decided to work on. The vault can hold the other ideas without making all of them part of my current workload.

I’m still building VibeVaultPro, and I’m using it in my Beat Lab sessions as I go. That’s where I find out what helps, what needs to change, and what I want to work on next.

Spreadsheets, ChatGPT tables, a Notion database, and now an app. Each step came from figuring out what I needed while I was making music.