in my sick head there are 3-4 main groups of building blocks and techniques:

1. traditional effects or methods (echo, flanger, FIR filter, poles filter, distortion...)

2. combinations of these effects (multiband echo, flanger which only affects the peaks, distortion AND frequency filter together)

3. complex processes, which can include offline editing, the way you use midi, but also processes for immersive audio, granular effects, or programs like melodyne, spear, the tau editor, an analog vocoder, you name it. stuff which you do not just drag and drop and press "on" to make a hit, but rather fiddle for hours with it and build a custom instrument.

4. #1 has a subgroup, which is the layer i work the mosts: a collection of building blocks, which are alone not yet an effect, but needed to build some of them (FFT, interpolation methods, modulation methods, something which plays a sample, something which loops a sample, something which records the stream into RAM buffer, hilbert transform, peak history analysis, this kind of stuff.)


when you try to combine all 4 levels into a single, monolithic masterprocess you will never come to an end and record a song, but you can easily kill a whole week with totally interesting nonsense, just because you can.