When I sit down to make an instrumental (masterpiece of course:D) I almost always start with laying out the drums. Because I don’t usually work with samples or loops, I feel that drums set the feeling and the genre of the track so this a good place to start. This isn’t always the case, however, sometimes if I have a melody in my head I’ll lay down the melody using whichever MIDI instrument I deem applicable for the style I am going for. On the off chance I do use samples, I mostly find it easier to lay out the finely tuned and cut up samples first before i get into the drums. Doing this I find myself using different drum sounds that I may have originally picked for a project, and also I might try out different drum patterns as well. Here’s an example of one of my instrumentals!
-Fellow musicians and producers, How do you start a project?
GoldenB 