For those of you who are old fashioned and start off your music/songs on a guitar/piano how do you approach instrumentation when it comes to electronic music?

Madeon must be "old fashioned" then because he starts all his songs with a piano

I'm an Evernote premium user. If it's web based I'll just save it into Evernote. These days I write down stuff A LOT in a Moleskine, writing it down yourself helps you retain the information better.

That was a fun, whether or not it's a myth! Based on the test, I am "Right Brain Inclined: Imagination", Right Brain 60%. Left Brain 40%. And music was second!

So once he's made his two mastering chains, he'll have a track of all his synths, basses, sub fx, and percussion (i'll just refer to this as the 'track') and then he'll have a second track with just his kick and snare on.

Just to make this easier to explain, let's say he's bounced these two tracks to audio and put them into a fresh project in Logic.

So he's got 2 audio tracks in his project, his kick and snare and 'track'. Everytime a kick and snare plays, he'll cut a tiny section out of the 'track' so that he has complete silence on the initial hit of the kick or snare, kind of like an extreme sidechain. If he were to cut this extremely accurately so that his kick or snare aren't playing at the same time as the 'track' or overlapping, this would result in the master not clipping, in theory. (And because these two tracks have already been mastered, the waveform would still look totally brick walled because nothing is overlapping, he's just slotting the drums into the silence that he's cut out of the 'track')

Since the snare has a fairly long tail on it, if he were to cut out a gap in the track for as long as the snare tail decays, it would sound awful and the 'track' would suddenly jump in volume when the tail has decayed completely. He's probably cut a tiny bit out for a few milliseconds where the snare transient hits leaving the tail of the snare overlapping with the 'track'. By doing this, his limiter doesn't have to work as hard, it only has to limit where the tail of the snare overlaps with the 'track' as opposed to having a huge transient to deal with.

wow, thanks oliverseuk for this extremely detailed response! I'm going to give this a go, I would have never been able to figure this out by myself!

I use WeTransfer to send stems all the time.

My friend and I have a theory that he has 2 mastering chains working together. One for just the kick and snare and one for the rest of the track. He'll completely sausage the entire track (like all the synths, basses, sub and effects) and then master the kick and snare separately.

Interesting theory, thanks for sharing it!

Then it's just a matter of sidechaining the kick and snare to everything else in the track or cutting small gaps in the track so he can slot the kick and snare in and have absolute silence to minimise clipping

I've read and re-read this sentence a dozen times but I don't quite understand it... can you please eli5?

How do you guys cut down on the amount of tracks you have in one project?

1. Bounce synth layers into one track.
2. Avoid redundancy. Don't have more than one track doing the exact same thing as another track.
3. Delete tracks that are really not contributing that much to the track.
4. Place similar sounds on the same track (like short glitchy sounds, etc..)
4. Group instruments into groups, bounce them, load these stems into a fresh new project and continue working. Personally, I never like having more than 50-60 tracks at a time, sometimes less (30-40). It's just clutter to me when it goes beyond 40 tracks.