Edit: Woops I didn’t finish. One possible solution is to decide how many bars the patterns will go for ahead of time. I usually shoot for 8 12 16 or 32. You could make like three patterns in advance, for example, and try to keep them simple at first to see if they work flipping back and forth. Once patters are made, just jam with them. 8 bars of pattern one, then 16 bars of pattern two etc. Now the boundaries are set so you can still jam but since you know how many bars you are confined to its harder to get lost. Also recording the jams and listening to them later helps me. I’ll usually go “oh I should have stopped there and then switched to this” - and that’s when I go chop chop on a daw sometimes or just try again and do it better
The only thing I struggle with is feeling like im not bringing the ideas I’ve created to their full potential. To counter this record as much of your performance as you can on individual channels and then you can edit and add as much as you like.
Speaking of which… Does anybody have any ideas how I can record 6 tracks, maybe more, simultaneously? (in order to help with finishing tracks with my hardware stuff) porta studios 8 tracks etc seem to only be able to record 2 tracks at a time
I also find it easy to get ‘loopy’ with hardware. If I don’t have a firm goal in mind, I escape this loopiness by using editing techniques I take from writing.
During the jam stage I crank out as many ideas as possible as fast as I can. I try every technique I know to create variations. Key changes, percussion fills, turnarounds, filter tweaks, CTR-machine plocks, whatever. Often I’ll end up with a bunch of patterns, some of which work better than others. But the key here is, I don’t judge/edit mentally at this point. All ideas are good, just save to an empty pattern slot and move on.
Only after I’ve got a lot of ideas and patterns do I start looking for potential structure. I start pairing and combining patterns in various order and exploring how they work in succession. Many patterns I created during the jam stage fall by the wayside during this phase. As accepting of ideas as I was initially, I become equally critical now, as I’ve got an audience in mind. This phase takes longer and can be a bit more painful, as I badly want certain ideas to work, but upon listening I accept they don’t work in a larger context. So I kill many of my darlings.
Gradually I have a smaller set of usable patterns and ideas for how to transition from one to another. Then I start getting them under my fingertips. I practice moving between one and another. Feel out what tweaks I can make manually and determine which ones I screw up no matter what … the latter I automate in some way if I can’t live without them.
I record sessions like this and listen back to hear what gets me up and moving. Those are the sections I’ll usually keep.
Eventually a track structure starts taking shape in my mind. Then I start practicing performing what I hear in my head. Run through the initial structure. Find ways to vary it as I go. Practice and polish some more.
By the time the gig rolls around I’ve made a few written notes to remind me of a good leadin/starting point plus a basic progression. I’ve got many tweakable parameters saved to places like OT scenes or MD CTR machines, so I can make changes and jam easily, even when I’m half-distracted by people in various mind-altered states or some beautiful bod across the room.
After this entire process, I’ve got a track in my head I can perform in a few different ways, stretch it out if I like, end it quickly if it’s not working. And all this for something that lasts a few quick minutes, after which I’m on to the next piece, which has demanded its own lengthy development process at some other point in time. 
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A while back I switched to an all hardware setup and eliminated the use of a computer in my studio. I found I spent a lot of time sitting at the synths playing video games on the computer rather than be productive, but i digress. One of the issue I had at first was putting together anything that I saw as a finished song. I had been doing many things to assist the process, such as keeping a very detailed moleskine of what patterns go together, whats on each individual synth track, key, scale, bpm etc. but ultimately i was missing the visual representation I was used to the DAW providing.
Eventually I had to play a show and was forced to sit down and deal with stringing together patterns in an structured manner (ie intro, breaks, fills, main patterns, outros). when i started to examine the patterns i had written, creating a song structure in my head became easier the more i approached it as a song rather that just a cluster of sequences with similar sounds i had written.
lastly having an idea where you are going with a tune (expectations, enforced limitations) and really knowing your instruments helps.
over the years, i’ve found out two things about the ‘songwriting’ process that seem to work for me:
- it helps to record a few minutes at the end of a jam/exploration session, even if i have no idea what i’m doing arrangement-wise. i put the resulting audio, two or three minutes, on my phone and listen to it a number of times over the next one or two days. it’s key that i can’t change anything, i have to listen to it as it is – some parts will become annoying the more i listen, some parts and combinations of parts will become interesting – the stuff i look forward two when listening. after a day or two i’ll start editing again, get rid of the boring and annoying parts, keep the interesting parts and work from there. put it on my phone again, listen for a while, then edit again. sometimes that’s it, sometimes it needs another round or two.
- my best work is often just a splinter of the thing i thought i’m working on. i may have programmed a drum beat, played a bass line, layed down some chord progressions etc. when some ‘wrong’ settings in my effects chain or some other happy accident suddenly make the few bars i’m currently working on sing. could be the bass line i’m tweaking and having fun pitching it, distorting it and sending it trough a delay effect – suddenly it’s not a bass line anymore, but it’s cooler than everything i had up to that point combined. then it’s time to kill everything else, as time-consuming as it might have been to make it, and only keep this new thing that happened by accident, in a few seconds.
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For me, a key thing that has helped me get more done on hardware is understanding the structure of the different hardware devices. For awhile, I would use a project on RYTM and KEYS for each new song. After getting to grips with MD and MM, I started to understand that I got more done with Elektron gear by using kits and assigning kits to patterns, having multiple songs in each project, and just generally working with that structure. Each machine handles this differently, but getting to grips with that has helped my workflow.
Also, working with modular and acoustic instruments, I basically need the OT to work OTB, because if I don’t record a modular line or bass track or whatever, it’s gone forever. That is my biggest struggle at the moment. In a DAW, I can just create an audio track and record that alongside anything else. In hardware, it’s more tricky. It’s the worst when you realize you turned off the OT without saving the recording buffer. I wish I could treat Ableton as just another machine in the setup, but the MIDI timing on computers is terrible and basically makes it unusable.
Im a hardware guy sold it all for a laptop just because I lost a fortune in money. Hardware is wonderful the tactile feel the ability to just MIX live. I miss my studio so much.
I don’t think you need it to bust out tracks I have my first live show coming up I’m stoked on it because I love to jam and just feel a groove form as I go maybe don’t over think the structure so much https://instagram.com/p/BZt0ySVHCbq/
A clip of how I’m going about it