With a smile on your face you are sending over the final version of your track to a friend after sending it to a few top labels. When nothing can go wrong (besides the label rejection your demo) your friend states the following: “sounds dope mate, but I liked the earlier version better”. You are getting slightly nervous, annoyed, so you send it to a few more friends and find them thinking the same as the first friend. You are starting to sweat and the frustration is growing, growing, growing and growing STOP!

Working too much on a track happens to us all, pro’s, amateurs and kids playing the flute in 4th grade. You start thinking where it went wrong, did you work to much on the levels and mixing? Or perhaps you changed the main elements in a way that made it worse because you have heard the original theme so many times, you started hating it in the end and changed it in the last days so it would sound more fresh in your ears. Well guess what, it won’t be the same for the other listeners, because they never heard your track before. Maybe you added some elements that ruined the harmonies of the maintheme? Or maybe you went mental on the equalizer ruining the full mix! There is no definite answer to this one, but there are things to understand that made the track go down like titanic did in 1997.

When you first start working on a track, you are inspired, you just made a cool piece of music/beat and it sounds so good. You are on fire, you are in the “hot zone”. If you had nothing else planned for the coming hours or days, you should have finished the track while you were still warm! Working too long on a track can be both positive and negative. But you should stop yourself in the process to give yourself some time to think, what is it that makes this track so good? Keep in mind the key elements of the track, and don’t change them too much!

Export clips from time to time and label them with the project file name. This way you can go back, and discover that perhaps a certain clip sounded better than the rest. But this might be lost work if you only used one project file on your sequencer and can’t track the exact changes down. Whenever you make an improvement or working on the track for a specific period of time, export a clip and label it with the project title. You can never save too many project files (unless you have an extremely small harddrive), but you can however save too little of project files.
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Finally you created that killer anthem you have been dying to make since the spicegirls appeared on MTV. You add beats, basslines, drums, FX etc. But for some reason it still sounds like something is missing. Is the theme not strong enough? Are there not enough elements playing? Is the atmosphere too simple? You don’t have to study rocket science to understand that there is not a simple answer to this problem since each track is uniqe in every way. In theory you can work on a track forever, improving, changing and so on and so on. But this is not reality, there will always be a limit on how much you work on a track, depending on how much you think it’s worth it.

A few examples:
You have a techy track with an awesome beat, you might be missing a killer theme or a nice melody in the break down.
You have written an 8 bar melody which is not very uniqe, but still good, you might want to add a melody on top. Problem in this case can be that two melodies are hard to get down in one climax, each element might drown in the other. In this case you have to seperate the two melodies based on their sound and flow. If you for example have a sawpad playing with about 4 kicks as length on each note, you could add an arp with a square waveform.

Two things to consider though, at first the sawlead waveform and square waveform sound very different and will not clash. Second, the fast notechange in the arp wont interrupt with the long notes in the pad. If your two new coworkers are black and white and have different height, remembering their names wont be a problem at all. One thing has to be similar though, they have to be related somewhat in the harmonies, otherwise when you bring in the second melody, it might sound like a different track and the ears of the listeners will have a hard time hearing both parts playing together. In the end there are no real rules, what sounds good, sounds good!
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Of course this post wont cover all cases, but hopefully it made sense. So to sum it all up.

Overworking a track: Remember what makes the track so good, don’t change a winning concept. Mix down different version labeled with their project file name. Save often and mix down often, specially when you make important improvements.

Underworking a track: Add new elements, but make sure they wont clash with the main elements, a new sawpad over a plucky arp might give the track a whole new better feel. But adding another arp with similar waveform will only ruin what you have already.