Programming: prior or during songwriting?

[Splat!]

I usually pre-program patches. Just can't work on a patch during a track, I lose my track idea, lol. I concentrate more on song-writing then.
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vapor genie review

[cl516]

sometimes they go hand in hand for me, but i alternate between days of programming sounds on virus to not programming a single sound at all but using the stuff i made to write songs instead. this has been my way since Virus C.

[Ceri JC]

My usual approach, regardless of the synth used, is to first make patches, keeping the genre(s) they'll be used for in mind. Then, when it comes to writing a track, I go and pick from amongst these and then almost always do some fairly minor tweaking to get it to sit well in the mix. Occassionally, I'll use a patch I've written previously exactly as it is, or make a new patch specifically for a track, but these latter two are much less common.