Ive been making music for couple of years now but still cant figure out why my mix doesnt sound professional. Im I doing something wrong?
This is the link to my tracks
http://www.ourmedia.org/nod...
Someone please help me out.

The best thing I can say is: learn about sound. Learn about frequencies, which ones sound like what and do what to the overall mix. Whether or not to use a low or high pass filter on something. Fiddle with EQs for hours. And more importantly, get criticism. It’s the easiest way to learn what sound to look out for, and such. And most importantly of all: Practice. Mix till your ears bleed. (from the time spent listening to the same song, not due to the terrible mix :P)

Mixing is one of my strong suits, but most of it is just being able to hear the song, and make the adjustments that I want, to be able to make the necessary changes and just know what needs to be done.

The 100% guaranteed way to get your bedroom mixes to sound more professional (and by far the most expensive) is to spend time in a recording studio. Take the raw tracks to something you want to mix, import it into their ProTools setup (or whatever they use) and have a pro engineer (must be a talkative, friendly one, not a grumpy, cynical one) to mix it. ASK A BILLION questions, be a dork and write stuff down if you have to.

The worst case scenario is that after 2/3 hours at least you’ll know what questions to ask of Google or at the local tech book store. The best case is that your music impresses the engineer and he/she becomes a pseudo mentor for you.

Engineering is by far my weakest area (along with playing in tune and in time) so everything that follows is said that caveat: I have found that going cheap on mastering tools (compression, limiters, eq) hurts bedroom mixes a lot. Money I’ve spent on the top utilities there (I use Waves) dwarfs all my other plugins put together by an order of magnitude. (Reason’s mastering suite is pretty good so you may be covered there; although I’ve applied Waves L2 to mixes done after the ‘final’ Reason mixdown and there’s no question there was a marked improvement in pro-sheen.)

I have found tweakheadz site very useful, especially their mixing 101 page.

Finally I have been told (and have experienced it myself) that posting often to ccM and asking for real, brutal reviews and feedback has helped a lot of people. I, for one, am very, very embarrassed by several of my uploads from 2 years ago here, while only very embarrassed by more recent ones; all strictly due to people hearing stuff I didn’t.

my buddy des has a great blog he runs that can surely help almost anyone here with improving their production.

http://www.hometracked.com/

also, his music is worth checking out, just so you can see that he knows what he’s talking about. des is a great guy and a really excellent artist.

http://www.deshead.com/

Quote: Tabasko72Ive been making music for couple of years now but still cant figure out why my mix doesnt sound professional. Im I doing something wrong?
This is the link to my tracks
http://www.ourmedia.org/nod...
Someone please help me out.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of higher frequencies in your mix… My mixes always end up being bass heavy (because I suck horribly) so I can see we both have the same problem… There’s is (however) an over-abundance of frequency-fighting in your track… A lot of distorted things competing for my attention (at least in my ears). Dunno if any of this has been helpful, but we could all learn things…so hopefully you’ll have advice for me in the future ;-) Good luck, and we me luck too!

-Joel

This is a useful thread. I’m just in the middle of mixing a new ccmixter-based song – and it’s just not coming together for me.

The tweakheadz and hometracked sites are great.

A couple other useful sites: tips and techniques at gearslutz - http://www.gearslutz.com/bo... ; Live tips - http://www.ableton.com/foru... ; general EQ reference - http://www.idmforums.com/sh...

I’m definitely going to get the mix I’m working on up here, I need some blunt advice.