I follow the Steven Pressfield model: The Muse of Routine. Mornings are always for analysis - I am always listening to mixdowns, deciding on arrangements, listening to interviews, and reading manuals. The day is for work and life - school during the semester, errands, learning a synthesizer or effect plugin or something, checking social media, etc. Nights are all about creation - composition, sound design, and all that good stuff that.

Obviously these routines can change, and different things can go in different places for different reasons or bleed over into different times, but it forms muscle memory and good habits, and I feel like after some time your brain gets used to the tasks it's performing so it's more ready TO do the tasks it's performing.

Read the instruction manuals for every single music or sound making or affecting program you have. I don't care if you've watched a bunch of youtube videos or been using it for a while. Always always ALWAYS read the manual - you learn so much that people miss out on, and the repetition of terminology starts to bury itself in your mind.

Just sort of expanding on what has been said already, but:

1. Templates (like you said), not just for projects but for synth/effects presets, FX chains, and MIDI patterns or already printed drumloops you've made.

2. Custom sample packs! In a similar vein, start looking at samples you find yourself going back to a LOT. Copy them to a new folder labeled "Sotile's Sample Pack" and start organizing them. Whenever you have a really good processed sample (like a layered snare hit you think sounds amazing), bounce it out and put it in that sample pack in a "Created Files" section.

3. CLEAN YOUR WORKSPACE! A cluttered desk is an anxiety-ridden desk. Make sure everything is organized in a way where if you need to stop composing or arranging and have to go get something, it takes as LITTLE time as possible. Get any outboard gear set up in an easily accessible location, and have it pre-routed into your DAW.

4. Try to get to the arrangement phase as soon as possible if you're feeling stuck in 4, 8, or 16 bar loop land. Once you have that fat stack of sounds (Kick, Snare, Hats, Bass, Synth, Arp), duplicate it out to be the desired length of your song, then start adding markers for the different sections: Intro/Breakdown/Buildup/Drop/Breakdown/Buildup/Drop/Outro (as a basic shell) or whatever you feel works. Look at all those duplicated clips of MIDI and Audio. Decide what sounds would NOT be in those sections, and delete them (if a variation on something would be there, keep that and just rename the clip to the different element). Take out all the drums for the breakdowns, take out the synth for the drop, take out the hats for the first half of the drops, etc. Start duplicating things that would be different elements, change the name of that track to the new element (Synth to Breakdown synth and Bridge synth and Drop Chords, for example). Even though you haven't changed ANY of the content, you'll see your track really start to take shape. Once you've renamed everything and started consolidating your clips to represent the new sections, you can go in and start fixing things!

It's all gonna be dependent upon the key of your track and all that good stuff, but a good starting point is to try and have a 100 Hz kick and a 200 Hz snare. From there, you can just high pass everything else at like 150-200 Hz and your low end is free to work on its on. With DnB especially you want to make sure your kick has a nice tight tail, so that there's no bleedover between the end of your kick and when the compressor lifts off the sub.

Three groups for drums: Kicks (has the KICK plugin with some generic kick patterns, Maschine 2.0 loaded as a plugin, and the two audio tracks where the kicks in Maschine are routed), Snares (from Maschine), and the rest of my Maschine Percussion (routed into a bunch of extra audio tracks buried in the group). Live Audio is connected to my DR-CX1. Reverb and Delay are the standard FL returns with some modifications for my own tastes, and I have Voxengo SPAN sitting on my master.



These are just whatever drums I'm feeling at the time as a standard kit - once I'm comfortable with a basic loop i start exchanging a lot of the sounds to fit what I wanna go for. Their colors match the colors in Ableton too, so I can always keep visual reference of what I'm looking at.

I'd definitely say focus on the accents. Put some fills in that drum loop! Some extra hats or a variant on the kick/snare pattern on the 4th bar, a bigger fill on the 8th bar. maybe some additional percussive elements that you could use as guide markers for little flairs and modulations you could do to spice up the basic groove you have going. from there, i think you could find a variation to build on for the second drop and really polish it up

I use Little Alterboy (got it during their SXSW promotion last year); it's got a very clean interface and I think the formant shifting is fairly clean. I use it to add harmonies on vocals, make a shoutbox, or use it as a vocoder/talkbox effect.