Don't be afraid to use presets. They're really useful in fleshing out a skeleton for your track before refining the patch to suite your exact need. If you limit yourself to resynthesizing every patch every time you'll find that you forget where you were going with the idea for the track. I sometimes also like to just chuck any old random patch into a tune and mash the keyboard to experiment. It's usually not exactly what I want, but it gives me ideas if I'm stuck for inspiration.