J. Anthony Allen explains there's no single right way to start a track. He begins with drums using a temporary loop to spark ideas, then replaces it with his own parts. He hints at a controversial guide track technique he'll cover next.
Okay, where do we start? This is always a question that people ask me. The real answer is it depends on what you're doing, and it depends on how you like to work. Some people like to start with the drums. Some people start with melodies. Some people start with a sound. Some people start with a chord progression. After you do this a lot, you'll kind of find your workflow. What tends to work best for me is starting with drums, because I find getting a groove going to be something that kind of inspires more to happen. But again, experiment with this. Do whatever you like. So sometimes what I'll do is just throw a drum loop in and knowing that I'm not going to keep it, it's just there to start giving me ideas. And then I'll go back and replace that drum loop with something of my own. So I might just throw any drums in there just to get some, you know, get some stuff down. Start experimenting on the keyboard, on a controller, on a MIDI guitar, whatever, and just see what I find. But before we do that, there's one trick you can use that is really handy. And some people kind of frown upon doing it. But as an educational thing, I think it's totally okay. So I want to show you this trick that you can do, but don't tell anyone you're doing it. Cool. So let's go to a new video and talk about guide tracks.
