Thanks for sharing! I wasn't really excited about Haywyre's older tracks, but this 80's rock vibe in the first two tracks really resonates with me. Do You Don't You is not only a beautiful track but also great ear massage.

Sounds great! I kind of like the extreme ducking, maybe it's because of all the future house bass stuff that I've been exposed to lately... Agree with outofplastic about the sub during the break.

As for the toms, to me they sound a bit too thin. Maybe a tiny bit of reverb would help?

Depending on the type of music you make you might get some good use out of crispydinner's snares on freesound.org. He also makes really good kicks, just search his name on there.

Thanks, will check them out. Yeah, I completely ignored that snare sounds vary a lot between genres. I'm currently trying to produce electro house stuff in the styles of Madeon and deadmau5, but what I'd like to have is a nice generalist library of samples so that I can easily experiment in styles like glitch hop, neurofunk, and maybe even dubstep.

E: formatting

Not really answering your question (I'm actually struggling with the same problem myself), but I just want to note that upgrading to 64-bit won't help much if your CPU is the bottleneck. The main advantage is to be able to use more than 4GB of memory. Not to say you shouldn't upgrade, just don't expect it to solve all problems!

You probably want to look into FM as well. Dexed can load DX7 presets, so you could play with those to get some inspiration. Especially the e-piano and bass presets are some of the defining sounds of the eighties 

Absolutely nothing wrong with starting to write a song like that in my opinion. When you have that spine, you can start to vary the chords inside the bars by

* creating inversions with the bassline: for example, say you have a progression IV-I in C major, so there's one bar of F and one of C. In the first bar, instead of using just a whole note F in the bass, write F (half note) A (half note), or even F (whole note) A(quarter note) B(quarter note), so you get a little melodic line in the bass.

* thinking of the highest voice in your chord progression as a melody line. You can later move this to another instrument if you like, or just keep it in the pad/piano/whatever as a sort of counter-melody.

* "visiting" other chords during the bar: let's say you have that two-bar IV-I chord progression. Inside the first bar, you could write a small sub-progression IV-I6 (so in C you'd have an E in the bass)-IV

* varying the rhythm. The chord doesn't have to change on the first beat!

Also, check out the other threads on this forum about the topic, I think there's already a lot of good info about the theory behind chord progressions.

It would be cool to hear from people how they approach snares, i.e. do you use samples, or do you synthesize them?

If you use samples, what are your go-to libraries?

If you synthesize, do you have any tips to share? I started digging into snare synthesis, and found this great recent tutorial by SeamlessR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A7oFpmXuls. The basic idea for snare synthesis is pretty simple, but what really makes the sound is adding reverb in the different components, and glueing them together with compression. I also noticed that it's easy to make your snares more interesting by creating any kind of "metallic" sound (e.g. some of the stock wavetables in Serum), band-passing, and setting the envelope so that it gives a nice metallic "ring".