I'd start with the Drums. You need a strong fundament first of all. Choose the right drum samples from the very beginning. Look for the right groove right off the bat. In electronic dance music its usually the toms/percussive elements that make the groove. You can always lay down a simple 4/4 kick beat real quick but trust me on this one...its the TOMS/PERCUSSION elements that makes you wanna dance in the club...the sooner you get this the better. A decent percussive pattern can make your simple 4/4 kick snare drum beat sound 10 times better. They have to compliment each other though. So don't overdo stuff...keep it simple and compact. Then i'd put a crash cymbal (with a very long synced delay) on every 8 or 16 bars. It will give your drum pattern more rhythm and on top of that it will give your arrangement a more flawless transition between sections. Also keep in mind that electro house drum samples are usually really short and "clicky" sounding. You can achieve this by tweaking the release time of the sample.
Also very important tweak/mix WHILE you're creating the track...not after! I wished i had realized this from the very beginning. If you do the drums, tweak/mix them while you're creating the pattern. If you make it sit right from the beginning, you don't need to go back after you're done with the arrangement. It can seem a bit overwhelming at first if you're not familiar to mixing your own records but its better you learn it now than later. Take it slow...if you do the drums, tweak/mix them till you like it AND THEN go create the next section...bass for example. Again...tweak the bass, make it sit in the mix...THEN go to the lead synth or chord stabs, etc. Take it one step at a time. It will help immense if you do the mixing WHILE you're working on the beat/track. If you apply this rule, by the time you're done with the arrangement your track should sound so good that you only need to fine-tune a few little details. Realize that most EDM producers mix their records themselves. And don't get angry if you don't nail the mix the first time...it will come with practice.
After you're done with the drums its up to you if you want to go the synth/chord progression route or do the bassline first. If you're not familiar how breakdown/drops/transitions work in electronic dance music then you should concentrate on that first IMO. First of all...club music looks/sounds more complicated than it actually is. Not to say that its easy to make a beatport smash...that is not the case. But once you get how a edm club track is structured, you already won half the battle. The other half is having catchy melodies and knowing the technical side of things.
Transitions are usually made with white noise. In most cases, you route it through a low/high pass filter and then all you do is automate the cutoff frequency of the filter or the "color" parameter of the white noise plugin. When you have everything set just make it open/rise up to the end of every 8 or 16 or 32 bars...no rules here. Or make it go down again in the next section...no rules either, its up to you. Also how long it takes to build is up to you. Some songs have white noise FX you hear for 16 bars till it drops again. You can always combine white noise transitions with crash cymbals to make everything flow better. You could for example make the white noise rise up to the end of the 16/32 bars and then release the tension with a crash cymbal...again no rules here. Electronic dance music has a lot to do with knowing how to build tension and drop/release it again. Also good to know, white noise build ups are usually sidechained to the kick pattern. The porpuse of this is to give your pattern more groove/rhythm. Sidechaining can be essential sometimes. If you're asking yourself where to get a "white noise" plugin now, most software synths already got a white noise unit integrated. Native instruments "Massive" for example. Of course there are other types of transitions aswell. Sometimes white noise is not enough and you wanna take your arrangement and pitch it up slowly till you release the tension and go back to the main section again...or whatever you feel like. Filter-sweeps, white noise, pitch bending...there are all types of transitions.
If you want to learn the whole science of building tension and dropping the beat, i'd recommend you to go to beatport.com and listen to a lot of new music. In your case the electro-house section cuz that's the sound lmfao is going for. Listen to the transitions in different sections. Listen to the breakdown and the build-ups. It will help. You learn how to arrange your track by applying techniques you heard in all the commercial songs.
If you look at party rock anthem you can notice that:
-white noise is being triggered (w/o sidechaining) every 8 or so bars.
-they extend the "drop" for 1 or 2 bars to create bigger tension release...(listen at 2:22, 3:40, 4:56 and 5:28). This is a commonly used technique in edm.
-the synth chords in the breakdown have a lowpass filter slowly opening up ...again, all this serves a purpose. To build tension.
-notice the pitched fx filter sweep that is building up at the end of the breakdown together with the snare roll.
Just a few examples but learn how to break down the song structure like this and you will be doing some fly ass arrangements in no time. Listen to all the little details...be really fastidious about it. Listen to A LOT of music and soak everything up like a sponge. Once you know what to do, look up youtube videos and learn HOW to do it..there are plenty of tutorials around. All you need to do then is apply those techniques on your own production.
