Never forget how many hours of training and how many takes are involved in these videos.
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On the slug
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Yes on the slug and I don’t have the patience to ride that slug.
A ducks feet under the water springs to mind 
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I get the impression that it’s all in the preparation in the case of @Eaves agreed, but his output is too prolific to be spending days or weeks on one track. Anyway, maybe he’ll chime in about his process rather than me guessing about these things.
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Theres one
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You’d get affordable rates and great quality if you hire me. 
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FWIW I don’t agree that Elektron boxes are like computer programming. I get lost in the Elektron boxes in a different, more fun way.
However, I’ve only been doing this for months, not years, and I don’t hold myself to any standards as a musician, producer, whatever. I’m a middle aged computer programmer who loves music.
Maybe this is my workflow for making “music” in an Elektron set up:
- jam (this is the noodle/creative/trying to express a feeling/discover a feeling bit)
- arrange, where the jam has to take shape into at least one part, maybe two
- expand (use another instrument, for me A4 then AR or AR then A4)
- Play it, learn to perform it as single take
- record it
- listen and take notes
- revise and re-record (repeat until bored)
- stick on soundcloud and never go back to it, who cares?!
Only stage 5 and 6 are on the laptop
As another 'naut said in another thread, the above is a funnel, not everything gets through every step. But with most probems the deal is expressing what the issue really is. I have no goal beyond enjoying and getting “better” (whatever that means)
What are you trying to achieve? If you want polished music you’ll have to either polish (which if you do, you will get better at/faster at) OR pay for polish OR find a collaborator who likes to polish.
Maybe you don’t want polished music? Everything sounds so pristine and over produced anyway.
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Im all over it!
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Or find somebody who speaks polish.
Polish and polish are different…except at the start of a sentance.
They’re also not different when said out loud. 
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What works for me is getting the individual sounds right at the source.
Having all your drums tuned propermy at the start, and choosing samples to avoid frequency clashing. Does way more than working with eq and compression IMO.
I feel like a lot of music is overproduced these days.
Working on stuff for ages squeezes the life out of it - jam for a while and if IT clicks, it clicks, have fun!
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I feel like Ylva doesn’t get that bogged down in stepwise details. They seem more focused on the overall arc and structure of the music - the bigger picture. I definitely aspire to this. Of course I could be wrong, but that’s always been my impression of Ylva.
For me, it’s all about organization and templates. I have zero interest in faffing about with setup, routing, midi mapping, etc, when it’s time for creative flow. I just want to play, have everything ready to rock the second it’s fired up, and be able to find whatever samples I might need in seconds. To enable this flow state, I’ve spent a ton of time developing (Ableton) templates, painstakingly organizing and renaming samples, and re-routing the studio. However, after having put that time in, I rarely need to do more of that. I can just get to playing/recording, without delay.
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As someone who recently was 100% in the DAW, I both agree and disagree. Yes, Elektron is very programmatic and I especially hate the process of browsing for and adding sounds to a project. With all those buttons, I could think of so much faster methods for adding 20 sounds in various categories to a project than the constant [left up yes down down yes right down down yes yes] process that a Digit*** requires.
But when it comes to ‘discovering’ a song in the middle of a jam session, they are just incredible. My creativity and, perhaps even more importantly, the fun I have when goofing around with ctrl+all on patterns, is something that would just be impossible to achieve in the DAW. It’s such a different experience to me, and so much more rewarding. But yes, occasionally frustrating too.
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For me, a big part of what makes me save time in the process of going from an idea to a song is to think simpler at the beginning of the process: use fewer sounds!
A friend and I had a song we worked on and were quite proud of back in January this year, where we spent countless hours (probable more than 50 hours) of time mixing it because it just wouldn’t sound very good. In the end, it just wasn’t fun anymore.
I got the Digitone a few weeks back and as I was starting to goof around with it, I made an embryo of a song on it and had fun with the live jamming aspects of it by turning knows, ctrl+all on patterns and other things just as a fun thing. I then recorded a live take into the DAW, cut a few things here and there and sent it to my friend for some feedback (basically “is this worth continuing to work on?”). The fascinating thing is that not only did he like the song, but he said it sounded really good in his car (our hardest test for the other song we were mixing)!
So what was different? Aside from being a lot more fun and spontaneous in the way this Digitone song came to be, it was MUCH more simplistic. Basically it’s a drum track, a monophonic bass, and an arp, and that’s it. This offered me tons of shortcuts:
- What’s actually in the song better be decent because I couldn’t conceal its flaws by layering a ton of other shit on top of it.
- The simplicity puts way more emphasis on how the sounds evolve over time, so I had lots of fun jamming with the filters etc and it worked well because of how clean the track was.
- Fewer sounds mean more room for reverb and delay. This is a constant problem with too much going on in a track.
- Because very few collisions happens in the frequency spectrum when you are working with no more than 3 sounds at the same time, mixing is a breeze.
I listened to the song from January again today and my immediate reaction was that it is just too darn crowded. There are too many sounds competing for the same previous frequency range and it clearly does not work no matter how many surgical EQ drops you place across each synth.
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I think the trick is to find a style of music that doesn’t have the hyper-edited micro-managed aesthetic built into it. Then you can build a setup that is mostly improvisation, leave the tapes running, and do minimal edits if you want to make a recorded track. Natural to do with dub or some kinds of techno or lo-fi house. Difficult to do with future bass or IDM or drill n bass.
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Yes your right. The Genres do matter hugely on micro management. Some are easier than others. +1.
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And it’s not even about hifi/lo-fi - in interviews I’ve read Ricardo Villalobos (who I think makes some of the cleanest and detailed mixes in electronic music) talks about making tracks from recorded live sessions.
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Choosing great samples (assuming you use a sample-based approach) is really important. If the sample already sounds great, well balanced, and sits in a mix as it is, you’ll have to do much less work in the late stages of music making.
I’d also suggest taking the time to setup (or have a skilled friend setup) a great mastering chain that will clean things up without too much fuss. A compressor (SSL buss style always works; multiband is great too if you know how to set it up), a clean EQ with a low cut around 20Hz to control sub lows and a nice smooth high shelf set to taste per song (FabFilter ProQ is really great for this), and a tape-emulation plugin will all help to get things sounding great quite easily.
I also echo the idea that if you want the creative flow state without getting bogged down, it makes a lot of sense to find a mixing/mastering engineer to help with the finishing stages.
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