I couldn't agree more about leaving space and room for expression. As with guitarists, the really good ones know what not to play.
Anyone who has spend 5 minutes in the sales business knows the power of silence and how to use it, although in that sense, it's a silence crying out to be filled rather than savoured.
I think the tendency to over-produce records has been replaced with a more "stripped down" sound in a lot of modern music but there are still plenty of young producers who feel that their equipment and abilities aren't being fully utilised if they haven't got everything working to capacity!
I was doing some recording recently with a friend who was making his first ever venture into a studio. The recording engineer listened to what my friend wanted, recorded the two tracks, added my guitar work to it and suggested we come back in a couple of days to listen to the finished item.
I had warned my pal that a lot of these engineers have their own ideas on what music should sound like but he was still taken aback by the sheer amount of extraneous instrumentation and heavy drum tracks that all but obliterated what were originally simple and melodic songs.
Fortunately modern recording equipment has so many free tracks to use, none of that "bouncing" tracks together like we used to do in the good-old-days, so it was a simple enough matter to begin stripping the tracks back down to a more acceptable level, but it's amazing how many people think that "more" is better instead of looking for subtle ways to accent what is already there.
Spaces, pauses, stops, whatever, are all great song-writing tools and, used well, can greatly add to the message, so lets hear less!!

C-flat.