im really lost production wise maybe you can help?

[jancivil]

Play. Enjoy. Make mistakes. Roll around in them. rather than Be productive is some wisdom.

Give yourself a break. I note 'music production' conflated with 'creativity'. You evaluate yourself as good at making synth patches but creating a whole song isn't happening.
Something about 'produce', 'productivity' is driving you to have goalposts you aren't meeting.

The people that do get songs done and a certain kind of prolific didn't get there just out of an evaluation that they should, they built themselves over time.
I may be wrong and if so forgive me. But when I see the emphasis 'Produce' dominating here, I arrive at a guess that you came to music through the computer first.
What in your actual history makes you believe you're prepared to create a song yourself?

The real world preparation for being able to follow through with writing a song or piece of music, is being involved with preparing a song or piece of music for performance. With other people, say in bands doing covers of songs and getting their act together for stage or to play in bars, or what-not. Or one has done with family at home, around the piano and singing songs. Or one prepares a piece of music 'in the repertoire' for recital. Again and again.

Then, getting it down as a recording, and building a whole production is another skill set and we've been in studios and watched the engineer etc, and discussed with the engineer and had input on the mixdown ultimately.

But now with computers, one gets the notion that all of this is available just because it's there. You can grab some templates and some other people's rhythm tracks [loops] and paste things into a sequencer/timeline and you're good to go.

On top of this expectation one receives the notion that you should be good to go and you should have product. But the reality is, if you do not have this preparation, you aren't prepared. In this case cut yourself some slack as to having a finished product. Take the steps that people in real life take and rather than worry about this magical destination not being reached, think of that as a really enjoyable and rich - and long - journey.

[SODDI]

Joking aside, I'd say that what you need to do is to stop buying more plugins. Actually you need to strip down everything to absolute minimum. Do a clean reinstall and then put back only the minimal stuff you like the most. Keep only 3 to 5 synths maximum, the same goes for effects processors. You can even limit it down by sound characteristic, for example, keep only digital sounding synths, and try to do everything with those.

I agree with this. One of the things I've tried is to make self-imposed rules for music work - a couple of years back I would not make anything over 2 minutes long, and the aim was to make whole, consistent pieces of one minute or under. Sometimes, rarely, I did it. And, of course, some of the best bits came when I broke those rules.

The current rules are no emulative samples of any kind (it's rough getting rid of snares), no loops and no global effects - in fact the idea is to remove all but the most subtle effects from the mix. A lot of my tracks go down mono. The aim is to create purely electronic-sounding electronic sound. It's hard, but it's liberating.

A lot of this is based on the intent and ideas in Eno and Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies", but I don't use that specifically. I make it up myself.

The other thing I like is to create purely experimental sound with no intent of recording it - just letting it go. I learn a lot about my tools doing that. Unfortunately, I was happier doing that in Audiomulch than I am in Cubase. Something something about linearity and the grid.