I started producing back around '99-'00.  Back in those days there was no affordable broadband internet, tracks were still on vinyl, and production software was very hard to get ahold of let alone find tutorials to watch.  Unless you knew someone who knew what they were doing, you pretty much had to teach yourself from the ground up literally everything there was to know about producing a track.

I was able to come up with plenty of stacked 8-16 bar grooves, riffs, ideas, song starts, etc...but had no idea how to arrange things...

So for me, the most logical thing to do was to take my favorite tracks of the time and mimic everything in the tracks the best I could.  Everywhere a hi hat happened in their song, I made one in my song...everywhere there was a string melody in their song, I made one in mine...and so on.  I started with Way Out West - The Fall.  I listened to the song play from my turntable as I rebuilt the song in MTV Music Generator on Playstation (yes really).  For things that I couldn't mimic, I improvised.  It took fucking FORVER, but something about dissecting a song this way made things click in my head that otherwise would be very hard to explain.  Doing things this way sparked an epiphany in my brain and really helped understand why things happen the way they do in tracks.

I really recommend trying this method if you haven't yet.  However, don't release these tracks if they sound too much like the one you were copying...we already have way too many of those 

Here's the track.  It was the first track I ever produced:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/okyv86fcna0i721/BLAKE%20JARRELL_CANAL%20STREET.mp3?dl=0

Another thing I still do to this day is I take a track that I really like the arrangement of and just mimic their drums.  I build a skeleton to work on and I slowly add parts on top of that.  Eventually the track takes on a life of its own and I start editing the arrangement until it no longer resembles the track I'm copying.  This is just a great way to get over that "hump" of being stuck staring at the screen not being able to move forward.

Hope this helps.

Blake Jarrell

What I did was make a note of all the different elements coming in and out, and then make a bunch of time stamps. Instead of replicating the sounds in the original song, I would put in my own sounds that could take its place while having them go in and out at the same time as the original.

'99 ?! that's 16 years ago ! ho my god
yea nice idea though, but probably not for everyone (tried this last year and ended up copying the whole song's feeling/vibe because ?)

but def a good read ! might do it again but with that in mind