The thing about jamming in a band is that you've got a bunch of souls interacting with each other. This represents tremendous creative potentiality. A band with musicians that don't listen to each other isn't much of a band. At some point, with electronic music, you've got to do your homework- learn and experiment with your gear and software. With psytrance, there's some point where you have to just tweak around to discover a killer sound to be used in a current or future project. Musical vision comes into play, here, when you have to be the "editor". That is- choosing the right experiments (i.e. the sounds) for the piece of music. Of course, you can have vision for the overall approach and architecture of a track. That's a starting point, but for any good artist there's always little suprises along the way, this is what keeps it exciting. Obviously alot of artists have their formula, it's really represents their artistic limitations.
I don't know about you, but I find it difficult to just get in front of computer and "jam" unless you've done the experiments. Then with something like Ableton Live you can drop your bits of sound and sketch ideas for tracks.
Typically with a project (a track) i'll create hundreds of sound fragments/loops/patches. In the end, there are plenty that haven't been used, good for remixes or other projects. Sometimes i'll recognize a need, then try to build it (for example, "this section needs a hi-mid snare-ish sound for rhythmic focus in the measure"). One recent project will probably yield 5 tracks, all totally different, throw in some remixes from some other artists and i've got another album.
much fun...
dean
