02 Dec Pro-tip: You better get your productions right from the start or you’re gonna have a terrible time later.
I think it’s useful to think about producing a song in terms of a pyramid.
You put in a lot of time and effort at the start laying out a very solid foundation before incrementally increasing in height in smaller and finer amounts.
If you don’t get your base right at first, it makes it exponentially harder to go and fix it later.
I wrote an article years ago where I mentioned that it’s a good idea (in a drum and bass tune) to spend 3-4 days (if you have to) just working on your kick and snare. This is because they’re very important and if you have a shit kick and snare to begin with, it makes it harder to write the rest of the tune and it makes it a bloody nightmare to go and change them once the rest of the tune is finished.
Get it all right from the start, don’t put off fixing things or making them sound better until later, because you won’t; you’ll just end up with a tune where everything sounds kind of shit and you don’t have the motivation to go back and change everything.