Making electronic music is hard!

[jrmy]

Some of these ideas mirror things I've come into ass-backwards myself - notably: thinking of electronic music as a process more than anything else, the notion of "jamming" using electronic instruments, and that the riff is everything (even on keyboards).

If you've had good luck making drones that you dig, then embrace the drone! A lot of my early stuff when I was just figuring out my own workflow within DAWs entailed recording down a drone that I liked that had some sort of movement built in (either through modulation or delay) for an arbitrary amount of time, and then writing parts around or in response to it. Sometimes I would even go back and mute the original drone after enough "songlike" parts had been built up, and suddenly presto: it was a song!

Also, don't be afraid to lay parts down with instruments you feel more comfortable with. There's plenty of electronic music out there with guitar and bass in supporting or even lead roles! This is ILF, so obviously your guitars and bass don't need to end up recognizable as guitars and bass! Play them through synth pedals! Use your DAW to manipulate them so they do "impossible" sounding things! Or heck, just use them to come up with the approximate melodies you want, and then rerecord those melodies using synths!

If you're looking for an easily grasped drum machine, I've had good luck with the Drumbrute Impact, which was recommended to me first by another rocker who had just entered the land of electronic instruments themselves.

Don't forget that you can run synths and drum machines through pedals!

[dubkitty]

i think Boards of Canada killed the "no guitars in EDM" thing with The Campfire Headphase, which was slated by some reviewers for those damned guitars but then wound up in the magazines' Best Of The Year lists.

at least, i hope they did.