I entered a remix competition a few years ago and I got full audio stems from a David Guetta track. He has 26 tracks. Now, I don’t believe for a second that this is how the track was released. But assuming each kick/synth/lead/vox 3-5 layers, the song probably has 40ish tracks. If we add a few more tracks for the remaining FX with delay/reverb layers we are probably looking at 50 at most imo.
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My Last Album has two Songs with only one Track, just saying. 
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Link it 
I wanna hear it your music is great.
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Thank you @circuitghost! 
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A lot of the stuff I like - electro, ny new wave, New Romantic, early hip hop etc was minimalist in many ways. I realised a lot of the stuff I really like isn’t very complicated. It’s like food, if the ingredients are good, you don’t need a lot of them to make something special. There’s a fantastic episode of kitchen nightmares where Ramsey challenges an overconfident and excessively baroque chef to a broccoli soup battle, which proves this point in excellent colour.
This early electronic … partly hardware limitations, but also that many of the proponents were unschooled, or even deliberately spurned music education. And yet a lot of it is far more memorable than densely produced work these days…. Just because you have the power to do it doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Numan said when he first heard synths, he thought the sound itself was so good that he realised he could just play one note and it would be enough.
Carpenter told Morricone (Morricone!) his initial attempt at a score for The Thing had ‘too many notes’. We end up with an icy cold, sparse soundtrack that perfectly expresses the empty freezing waste the drama takes place in, and the absolute blood chilling despair of what is at stake. That opening heartbeat-like synth still makes my hair stand up now.
If you look at what really makes a lot of iconic music stand the test of time, it’s often a small part that elevates it - a riff, a catchy hook, a powerful sentiment concisely worded.
I am a minimalist in many pursuits - particularly in this era with such an over saturation of everything, and maximalist American mindset so influential.
certainly the Scandanavians tend towards it and the philosophy is evident in the Elektron designs. ‘Just enough but not too much” is a maxim we could use more of. It might just save the planet, in fact.
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It really depends on so many factors. When I’m recording with my band in a studio we end up with tons of tracks (8-12 for drums, 2 for bass, 4-5 for guitars, 2-3 for vocals, then extras for samples, buses, etc), but for my solo sets 4-8 tracks is usually plenty. Sometimes my breakcore songs only have 2-3 tracks. It’s all about what the song needs, the vibe, and the style of music.
Another factor I’ve noticed is that many DAW-only producers tend to stack sounds and leave them each on their own individual track rather than resampling. This gives more flexibility when it comes to sound design and mixing, but I prefer to resample when I can. For example, in a dance track my kick might be something I’ve sampled from a synth module, plus a deep kick sample for extra oomph, plus some foley for additional texture. While I could leave them each in their own lane, I tend to resample once I’m done designing the sound. In most cases I’ll be bouncing these sound to a hardware sampler (if it wasn’t made there in the first place), so it just makes sense for me. Other producers like to design as they go, or add elements once they’ve got the basic structure of the song/loop established.
As with most good things, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution and sometimes the best songs are the simplest!
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Lovely work, as always.
It’s done when your inner voice is satisfied. That’s my golden rule.
Last night, I recorded something from my Matriarch while I noodled around with it. Added a reverb and some light processing in Ableton and the track for me is done. It has wonderful movement and intricacy to the sound that I don’t want to add anything to it.
On the other hand, I’m working on an EP where I have 50+ tracks and it looks like this
and there are still few things I want to do before I consider it finished. 
I love both tracks. The simple one track take and the big arrangement I showed. It doesn’t matter to me how many tracks, I work until my inner voice stops.
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