So like everyone else, I have a mountain of loops and half finished tracks, but today I said to myself "enough is enough. You have 4 hours to make something start to finish". Now just to clarify, I'm not talking about inception to release (still putting some finishing touches on it), but I mean from opening the DAW until you have something that has all the main ideas and a beginning middle and end.
First of all: I started with a sketch I already had made outside of the DAW. If you play an instrument, and you have any recordings or Voice Notes of any ideas, this is a great place to start because it will probably be much better musically than something you make when staring at a blank project file. Even if you don't have a traditional instrument, I still recommend spending time just jamming and recording ideas on your phone of you actually playing. Even if you're not a great keyboardist or whatever (I'm not at all).
Once you have your rough idea in the DAW, do the arrangement first. If you do the arrangement after perfecting your loop, you have a high chance of getting stuck. Just drag your parts out and delete a few things for your breaks. Take out the kick here, the hats there, add a pad here, etc. That's all a track is anyway. A repeating musical idea with changes in energy. Theoretically, you can even do this with empty MIDI clips.
Now that you have the skeleton of your track built, you can go back and start tweaking sounds and whatnot. But once you have the skeleton, you can relax knowing that no matter what happens, you have SOMETHING that resembles a full piece. Of course, you can always make changes to the arrangement as well, but it's easier to visualize what changes need to be made when you can base it on what happens later on (extending or shortening parts, etc.)
The other most important thing is setting a timer. This forces you to move more quickly and also use less elements, which usually sounds better and is easier to mix (less clutter in the DAW and less clutter for the listeners ears).
Another thing you can do to create variety is to map some parameters of your instruments and effects to knobs and record it to a separate audio track while changing and playing the knobs to fit the track (changing the ADSR, cutoff, resonance, reverb dry/wet, etc.) This keeps things interesting without needing to write more parts.
Anyway, tl;dr: Set a time limit for yourself, do a rough arrangement first, headline festivals. Hope this is helpful.
Submitted February 17, 2017 at 12:08AM by -endjamin- https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/5ujv1z/finished_a_track_in_4_hours_today_heres_what/?utm_source=ifttt