by understanding the entirety of the concepts of the tools that are at your disposal.

If you want a more applicable answer....


You have to do enough research and log enough time with the individual components of your DAW as well as the basic functionality of your DAW.

Reading the DAW manual helps greatly, reading other DAW manuals might help inspire some ideas with the DAW you currently use.

quite honestly, i am doing less things more effeciently.

I can get quite a bit out of one sound source because i know what i am using and how i want it to work with in the given sound source. and when i get closer to finishing, i drastically reduce the load i have to do in mixing, because i've done all the prep work before hand with my sound sources.

the closer you get to finalizing your track, you should be turning down your volume on the interface, and not have to be doing so much. to a point where, you just sit there and groove with it. or you could just hate listening to it, even after a week break (that's when you should just scrap it for parts)

that's when i know i am ready for mastering or the scrap yard.


TL;DR

Make sure you're processing a solid input signal, and you should be doing less work as time goes on as you go towards finalizing or scrapping the mix/song

Usually when every new element I'm adding is either adding nothing compelling or covering an existing track.

The simplicity of using the bare amount of sounds/instruments in a song, to actually dictate it to be a song of any genre, also forces you to create a any one signal to be it's maximum potential.

That helps on any level, because if you're busting the seams with one sound, you'd hope that the entire song would sound good as well.


Here's the context though, that applies to the amount of attention you're giving to each sound. This should be easier to do given the few ingredients you have available to you. In order to maximize the flavor of each sound, you have to consider how each ingredient effects one another in the context of the pot (entire song and song components).

Make for a coherent piece of music using only the fewest amount of elements in a song.