Way back in the day, when Reason 3 was current, it had a demo mode. That demo mode disabled saving, and only gave you 20 minutes to play before it quit (or deactivated audio, I can't remember which). So if you wanted to have fun with it, you had to get from scratch to tune in under 20 minutes. You could, I think, use something like Soundflower so as to record your results into Garageband. Then you could arrange the results to make a track. But every time you wanted something, you had 20 minutes, and no means of saving, so you had to make everything from scratch every time.
This is akin to gamers speedrunning a game. They aim to go from start to finish as quickly as possible, possibly with other aims along the way like collecting all bonuses or something. I think when doing music production we should learn to work within similar constraints. I do like the EDM Tips channel, where he takes you through producing in one electronic style or another, from start to finish, in under an hour.
A lot of producers will fall into the trap of taking hours to perfect a particular synth sound, and taking days and multiple sessions to perfect a track. I recall in a Sound on Sound interview that Armin he says this
“In fact, the strange thing is that all my biggest tracks were written in under two hours.” —
The thing is, probably most DJ-producers will produce tracks for their set in a short amount of time, and the methods used to speed things up are part of what makes that DJ-producer's particular sound, along with their own collection of samples and presets that they made for themselves.
More From That Armin Article
There are also these quote:
“Let me tell you something: ES2 in Logic can make almost any sound you want. Maybe there's a few analogue things it can't do, but you can always emulate those in other ways. Benno has proved to me that you can make 95 percent of any synth sound you want with ES2. You don't really need more than one synthesizer if you invest some time in learning how to work it.” —
“One of my biggest tips would be to restrict your gear choice, because there's so much out there; restriction is good! The technological possibilities available are humungous, and they're actually too big for your own good. Twenty years ago your Juno 106 had just 32 presets, so you had to be much more creative with what you had. Right now you can buy a Virus TI with 16 oscillators and 12 distortions, so you can press one note and it goes 'Reeeoh' and arpeggios are going everywhere, but it can actually very much limit your creativity. If I really look at the essential stuff that we use, it's all about ES1, ES2 and EXS24, and that's it!” —