I find my songs have a lot of tracks but those tracks are grouped into 6 themes (usually.) Drums, bass, vocal, leads, pads, ambience & fx.
Where samplers and grooveboxes are helpful is in focussing on the idea before the layering stage. I find that my DAW songs only have reached 80 tracks and with an M1 (standard not Pro) this is about as far as it will go, so there’s a hard limitation there. (Though it’s pretty luxurious by all accounts.) It’s pretty boring I guess, but part of the reason is I tend to keep all the experiments that I do as I build a track, mainly because computing power means I don’t need to delete them as I would on a more limited device.
However my favourite workflow lands somewhere in the middle. Ideally this is working on some form of hardware groovebox with 8-16 tracks. Taking 8 tracks from a groovebox of some kind and then starting with the stems, I am less likely to add for the sake of adding. In my head I think this is because I’m trying to preserve the feel of the original and instead of layering it to within an inch of its life, I want to hear the core of the original come through. This tends to lead to sessions with more like 30-40 tracks and I tend to feel this is a decent workflow that makes the best of both worlds.
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