Been trawling this site for months and never posted so first things first; mad respect to all the regulars, great community vibe and incredible pool of knowledge…
Having a similar issue atm with composition / finishing tunes, building the busiest section first and then stripping it back for intro/breakdown etc makes perfect sense in my head though in practice I always lose it around the halfway mark. Been researching this over the past couple days and literally just found the following post on another site.
Credit to the OP Brendan Brady
*** apparently is too long for one reply so… Part 1
“My favourite trick is the doubling technique - the only tunes I've made and liked have been done this way (and it's how things like Modus Operandi were written afaik)
I actually hate thinking about music as layers on a horizontal timeline - it really messes with the way I hear things and makes me tire of things very quickly
So in the doubling method, you start with a simple loop that you like ... you then copy/paste it once, so you've gone from a 2 bar loop to a 4 bar loop, and add a variation or element ... double it up again, so you've got an 8 bar loop, and do the same thing
Eventually you get to maybe a 128 or 256 bar loop, and you can then edit it a bit more broadly and stick an intro and outro on”
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Part 2…
“Main thing is, at every stage, you're only thinking about the track being as long as it is ... You might add a variation to the snare pattern on the 2 bar loop; double it up to 4 and decide it gets tiresome the second time around; so you take the variation out on the 4th bar ... You build and think and use your imagination and judgement at every stage ... You might have a 32 bar loop, and decide that the 2nd 16 bars need a pad to come in - so you add an element ... and the whole arrangement sort of intelligently constructs itself, an evolves like a fractal out of your original loop
And the best thing is you never really go from loop to arrangement, you just keep working on the loop ... Sit down at your sequencer: double it up ... It's simple ... And you can have 50 projects on the go at once and just chip away at them
Tunes I've done this way have definitely had a flow and in-the-moment quality, because I know that every change and idea has basically suggested itself, and influenced every other change and idea ... and you may find you began writing your track from the middle, or from the end, and it only becomes clear as you progress”