I just don’t get it…
After years, and years of reading magazines, books and guides all to do with making music. From Bob Catz’s ‘mastering audio’ to Sound on Sound, to RSO video tutorials and of course Sonic Academy, listening to ****loads of music, playing guitar and piano, and DJ’ing, and practising lots of production techniques… After all that, I still can’t seem to make anything sound good. My levels are all wrong, the sound is often harsh and brittle, as well as unclear in the bottom end, uneven, overbearing, tiring and often boring. Not the kind of words you want to describe your music - especially after all the time invested trying to get good at making it.
Oh well, there goes my first post.
Looking forward to any pearls of wisdom out there.
Yours,
KWIG
Take your time man. if you really think your gonna be a superstar after creating a few tracks, you are sorely mistaken.
When I look at the separate tracks in a project I tend to look for the bigger picture, do the toms translate well with the kick, do the hi hats match, is everything in the same key, is this track compressed too hard, is there too much or too little reverb on the synth, is there too much or too little delay, do the reverbs and delays fit with the overall project, did I EQ the kick, bass, synth, percussion correctly? Does everything work well together so that nothing is really overpowering the rest of the tracks?
MY best advice is to follow a SA tutorial exactly how its done. grab the pack for the tutorial use those samples and follow closely to what’s being done in the tutorial. Level to Level, frequency to frequency. Spend time on each video (not just an hour for each video, try 3 hours), learning what each tweak does to a sound.
Read up on what compression is:
Great article on what compression is
http://dnbscene.com/article/1474-compress-to-impress-a-complete-compression-tutorial
Read up on EQing
ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC ARTICLE!
http://dnbscene.com/article/88-thinking-inside-the-box-a-complete-eq-tutorial
These are articles are relative to the concepts not the DnB genre. They work for any situation.
It all comes with time, practice,practice,practice
Cheers!
What Walshey said - but as many tuts you follow and books you read the best thing is too just try try and try and one day bingo it will fall in place
Every single person on this website has been in your shoes. And its frustrating as hell but you gotta just keep sticking through it! If producing were easy there would be too many famous producers in each genre. Thats why good artists get skyrocketed to the top, because they truely are OUTSTANDING producers.
The most important part is improvement. If you’re ever feeling down like “aww man! this track is sh!t, I don’t think I’m cut out for producing” (a little extreme I know, but it helps prove the point) then go back and look at your older tunes. You’d be surprised, you might think the track sounds bad at the time, but when you hear your older, crapp!er track playing, it’ll be a relief cause you know you’re going somewhere.
Basically, the best tip anyone can give you, is just find what style you’re truely passionate about and just produce what you want, without people telling you otherwise. Once you kinda get a feel of your own taste, practice, practice, practice and guess what MORE PRACTICE.
Avicii said in an interview that he took a full year off once he started really getting into producing and treated it like a full time job. He would work at it at least 40 hours (I’m guessing more considering how passionate he is) and just bang out tune after tune after tune. And with sites like soundcloud its so easy to share your material and get exposure and feedback. Eventually, you’ll put up a tune that will catch on and as long as the right ears hear it, boom! (Then you have to keep cranking them at that point to stay in the bizz :P)
I think the best way you can look at it is: Its not about the amount of times you succeed, but the amount of times you are willing to get up after failing.
Cause lets face it, you will fail, alot, everyone does… But its the people who get up and try again and again that make it in this industry.
aaaaannnnd end of rant, hope it helped with the motivation a little 
Ive been doing it 20 years and cant get things to sound right half the time.
The one thing that i defiantly know dosnt work is trying to fix bad source sounds with processing… anything that ive ever done that sounded great was the stuff i had to do the least processing to.
[quote]FlyingYeti (18/11/2011)[hr] Once you kinda get a feel of your own taste, practice, practice, practice and guess what MORE PRACTICE.
[/quote]
+1 
Mabey you need to look at the acoustics in your studio. No matter how good you are, if your acoustics are off and you have low end frequencies flying around all over the show, its gonna be very hard to get anything to sound good. See it as though your working with someone covering your ears with their hands…
I know its probably hard to do man… but if you wanted to post a few clips of stuff, I’m sure people would chip in with some specific advice.
No-one likes to see anyone struggling 
No-one will be mean to you… It would be worth it if you did.
Everyone is cool here Mate
Wow…
Thanks a lot all of you. Some really nice, and useful advice. I really appreciate it
I gave up any hope of being a superstar producer many years ago, and pursued an enthralling desk-job career instead. But my passion for music, music production technology, and making tunes is larger than ever.
But i haven’t really got anything for you to scrutinize. In all this time i dont think i’ve ever really finished a proper track. When i changed computers a couple of years ago i took it as an opportunity to start afresh so i wiped my hard drive…doh!
I’m working on a ‘remix’ for a friend at the moment, it’s taking bloody ages. If and when it ever gets finished i’ll be sure to post it on the forum.
Thanks again to all of you.
KWIG
i realize that throughout the process of making a track I change everything a few or more times… the idea i start with is never the end result.
Keep plugging away!
Happy 100th post to me!!!
God, i need a life and hooker. Slender can you get me one plzzz?
I do actually try and stick to the original idea - but ofcourse a track will develop and take on a sound of its own
Interesting enough I wanted to do something a little different for my new track which is working out well but still has that Nomad Spectrum sound
And Walshy for a person who lives nr Hollywood I think you can get your own hookers 
you shouldnt worry to much about Mixing , try to invest lots of time working with Music Theory if you do alot of Musical stuff. if you are more Beat Oriented producer invest as much time of learning how to make the sounds to be tight and Groovy
hollywood isnt the bad part of LA… all them hookers are obsessed with the DJs and Hotel owners…pizza delivery isnt on their schedule:hehe:
[quote]Walshyyy (19/11/2011)[hr]hollywood isnt the bad part of LA… all them hookers are obsessed with the DJs and Hotel owners…pizza delivery isnt on their schedule:hehe:[/quote]
So thats why you want to get into music production
[quote]alinenunez (19/11/2011)[hr]you shouldnt worry to much about Mixing , try to invest lots of time working with Music Theory if you do alot of Musical stuff. if you are more Beat Oriented producer invest as much time of learning how to make the sounds to be tight and Groovy[/quote]
Thats actually very good advice (for once from Aline)
If you ever listen to any of my tracks you will realise I am not really big on music theory - sure i know the rules and sometimes even stick to them but I assure you many big producers probably know less than i do
Your ears are the most important - if it sounds good then its good
yes im lonely lets face it im on the forums every day now:D but seriously it should be easy in hollywood right? one would think so:angry: really the place is just filled with wannabe tattoo artists and straight up weird goofballs
Started a new track tonight, its being built horribly but maybe thats cuz im drunk a little. It’s not sounding good. I might be posting a loop to soundcloud so you can help me out
[quote]KWIGMYRE (18/11/2011)[hr]I just don’t get it…
After years, and years of reading magazines, books and guides all to do with making music. From Bob Catz’s ‘mastering audio’ to Sound on Sound, to RSO video tutorials and of course Sonic Academy, listening to ****loads of music, playing guitar and piano, and DJ’ing, and practising lots of production techniques… After all that, I still can’t seem to make anything sound good. My levels are all wrong, the sound is often harsh and brittle, as well as unclear in the bottom end, uneven, overbearing, tiring and often boring. Not the kind of words you want to describe your music - especially after all the time invested trying to get good at making it.
Oh well, there goes my first post.
Looking forward to any pearls of wisdom out there.
Yours,
KWIG[/quote]
I’ve been in and out of that same situation for years now. My advice is to not just keep starting over every time you run into a problem. When you hear something wrong with your track, focus on that and try to solve the problem. Bottom end is uneven or boring? Make a special point of finding out how to make that sound good. Even if you end up scrapping your track, consider it good practice to learn how to avoid that problem in the future rather than bang your head against everything you ever create from here on out.
A sign of progress is that you can identify what can be improved. Your next step is to know how to fix it. After that, you’ll know how to avoid it.
Thats good advice Warbread.
One step @ a time… and in a structured way
Don’t wanna be harsh on you, but sometimes you’re just not good in a certain hobby.
I always tried hard to become a great tennis player, but really never made it out there. You have to have some certain skills that can’t be trained.
It helps to have a great ear in hearing what sounds good and what sounds like rubbish. Another thing is being creative. Nowadays being a bit technical is great too to master the digital boundaries of your DAW en VST’s.
[quote]daniaan (21/11/2011)[hr]Don’t wanna be harsh on you…[/quote]
I love it when people say things like this just before saying something harsh, as if by flagging up that you don’t want to be harsh it is ok to actually be really harsh. Well done.