No Delete

"No Delete" is the fourth track on the album Dropped Frames, Vol. 3 by Mike Shinoda.

Background

"No Delete" is a song by Mike Shinoda made during the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the global pandemic created by the COVID-19 coronavirus caused communities to quarantine at home. During this time, Mike Shinoda decided to start live streaming online and inviting fans to watch him create new instrumental music.

"No Delete" was a track made by Mike on July 7, 2020 under the working title "7.7 PT Jammy."^[1] On July 7th, Mike decided to take a look at the multitrack for "Open Door" in ProTools since the song came out on June 30th but the full album Dropped Frames, Vol. 1 was coming out a few days later on July 10th. After he did the multitrack tour of the song, he created "No Delete."

This was a track Mike made himself on "Freestyle Friday" without any fan redemption choices. He decided to do a quick song in a more improvised way, without going back to edit the already recorded parts. This is where the title "No Delete" originated. For the first time, there was no beat in the track. One of the pending requests was actually a track without beat or drums and Mike mentioned it on the July 14, 2020 stream, saying that he indirectly fulfilled that request but that he could do another one in the future.

He said, "I had a couple of ideas of how to approach a track that we haven't tried. Let's do a poll, so one of the ideas is to do almost like a stream of consciousness beginning-to-end. On these streams I usual make something, like I make a part, then I make a part that comes after it, and then I make another part, then I loop those parts and I work it out as it happens. But I thought that another way of doing it is taking an instrument and play for two or three minutes and then take another instrument and play over that. And so on. Maybe I don't play every instrument the whole time, maybe I just come in and then I leave. But the idea to be to not sit in loop mode. So that's one idea. And then the other idea would be to do a session with no plugins. To just to do keyboards and outboard effects. I don't need need to do a poll, you guys will pick both. Let's do both. I do have to have a click track. The other day I liked running the Nord through the guitar stuff, let me try that. Let me try starting with that. So all this is is the Nord keyboard with my original sounds."