Saw a good interview with dance producer D.Ramirez in Mixmag I think. Well anyway, he gave some sound advice along the lines of; spend one day making up riffs, bassline, and hooks, finding sounds that you like and keep it all in one session. Then come back to that the following day and see what you've got then pick and mix as you like for sounds you'd like to use in a track you want to create and save them/put them all in folder for referencing later on.
When you come to start the project have a brief idea of the structure and write it down, like e.g. : Intro, Section 1, Section 2, Middle 16, Section 3 etc... Basically giving you some guidlines or boundries to work around.
Then open up that folder with your saved sounds and bang them in your project, I personally have a pad and a pen to hand to scribble down ideas and things to try and have a look at, but it keep it fairly simple in the foetal stages of the track, and just gradually build things up and take a step back to see if there's too much going on or not enough. Don't start trying to major amounts of mixing and EQing just yet, little bits here and there but don't go mental with it when you're still working on the musical and intrumental side of things.
Take a break, and come back to it. Then start thinking about how it sounds, and get to work on your EQing, tidying up velocities, adding compression etc...
Might not be making a whole lot of sense here, my head's a bit mashed in fomr last night...
But try to look at making a track like this and dedicate using your time creatively and in an organisational manner for each stage of production, don't try and do both at the same time because you can end up trying to do too much and end up frustrated:
Pre-production: (Beat making, synthesis, finding sounds)
> Creativity- Like I said before, just do as much as you like and save it all to a folder or whatever.
> Organisation- Tidy up things like velocities, use EQ sculpting to get a rough outline of the space in the frequency spectrum you want that sound to dominate.
Composition: (Track/song structure, sections, breakdowns)
> Creativity - Write down a basic structure and just generally think about how you want your track to develop, give yourself a skeleton to work with and remember that you can always change it up if neccessary. Also experiment with the sounds in those sections.
> Organisation - Make decisions on how much you instrumental textures and musical features you'd like to have in each part of your track. Refine things and get the right balance until you're satisfied.
Mastering/Post production: (Mixing, finalsation of the tune sonically.)
>Creativity - I tend to think in groups of sounds when it comes to this stage and work in each environment of Bass, Midrange, and High end respectively, so what I'm trying to say here is SOLO those groups of sounds and just listen to see if there are any artifacts like pumping and distortion or shrill ear piercing twats of frequencies coming through in your mix, use your EQ's to sculpt the sounds giving them enough breathing space so they aren't having to compete with each other for power in that section. Cutting out useless frequencies is what you want to be aiming at here. Also decide if things need more or less compression and consider your overall volume output of your mix and tweak your master level output and master level compressor so there isn't any digital distortion.
>Organisation - Once you've got a good balance of the mix save your track upto where it is, and do a bounce if you're happy. But by this point you want to be taking a break, give your ears a rest and come back to it. You'll often find that it sounds a bit different once you do and may notice certain elements that might be too loud or that your mix hasn't got enough energy in certain frequency bands. If that's the case open up your project again and tweak it, but save it as another name like *Project Name V.2 Master* or something like, don't be saving over the original mix because you can royally fuck it up.
Hope this helps and remember that you can always go back to each stage of production if you want to add anything else. This is just a method and I certaintly don't always stick to it, but it does help dividing your time for the creative side of things and the organisational side of things. Because your using one side of your brain if you try to do both at the same time it can often have a conflicting affect and stagnate your progress. Not everyone is the same and not everyone has the same amount of time to dedicate to this shit, some producers will have spend a day on each side of the production working creatively one day and in an organistional manner in the next. I have to work in an evening when I come back from work so I'll spend maybe an hour being creative and an hour organising stuff. Or even breaking it down into 5 minutes chunks.
I'm off to get horizontal, I've typed far too much here. Hope this sort of helps, I know it's helped me.
