Recording, Planning, Re-recording

A favourite recording blog of mine has advised against the "write as you record" approach.  I however, must defend this way of doing things.  You see, I know that anything I write as I record is not going to be a usable, final product; nor is it a waste of tape (I've mentioned I still use tape, right?).  This is what I call a "pre-demo", and is absolutely critical to my creative methods at this point in time.  I need mistakes to learn from, and I need to get the idea down on tape in order to plan a re-recording of the same song.  

Once I have my pre-demo tape, I can take a step back and think about how I'm going to arrange the next recording.  During my break at work today, I took out my notebook, and drew a flow chart depicting which tracks would be on the first tape, then bounced to the second and so on.

One advantage of having a 4-track running at standard tape speed is that once I bounce to another tape (standard 2-track deck), I don't need to bounce  back; I just move the 2-track tape into 4-track and top it up.  Lately though, I have come to realize that my decks need to be cleaned and demagnetized.  I have ordered a demagnetizer and some cleaning fluid online, but I still wish to record in the meantime, at least just for practice.  I'll still get a nasty-sounding tape in the end, but it's all to gain experience points.