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Why Your Productions Sound Amateur (How To Get That Pro Sound)
5K views
Jan 3, 2022
++ SONG-FINISHING CHECKLIST ++ (Finish more songs, faster!) https://www.orpheusaudioacademy.com/mixingchecklist/ ✏️ SHOW NOTES ✏️ Have you felt frustrated that no matter how much you tweak a particular track, it just doesn't have that professional sound? I remember this feeling well, and it's incredibly frustrating. Well, it may be that you just making a few small mistakes that are leaving your mixes sounding amateur-ish. This video outlines some mistakes you can avoid to help you get that "professional" sound you are after. ⛓️ LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO ⛓️ 🔗 Pogo music tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSlBiBu6-fs ⌛TIME STAMPS:⌛ 0:00 - Intro 0:30 - Two key areas to improve
View Video Transcript
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So you mix in and you're mixing, but you're like, Hey, why do all my songs sound kind of
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amateur and not like the professional songs that I hear on Spotify or the radio
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Well, keep watching because in this video, I'm going to go over why your songs are sounding
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amateur and what you can do to get that professional sound. Hey, I'm Reagan Ram with Orpheus Audio Academy.com, helping you make better music and grow your
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fan base online. In this video, I'm going to give you some quick tips, some simple things
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and maybe not so simple things that you can do to avoid sounding amateurish and get that
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professional sound. So there's really two categories that these mistakes fall into
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Number one is arrangement and number two is mixing. So first I'm going to cover kind of
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different arrangement things you can do to get more of that professional. Error number one is
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not having a dynamic arrangement, meaning things kind of stay the same energy all the way through
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the song. You don't have any highs or lows. So the thing is, when you're writing a song
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you kind of want to, it's kind of like writing a novel or telling a story
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is you kind of want to have a gradual increase in energy, but along the way
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you're going to have some ups and downs. So for example, you might open with your first verse
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and that might be the lowest energy part of the song. And then you have a chorus, which is higher energy
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but then it kind of dips down a little bit to that next verse, but it's still higher than the first verse
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Then you have your second chorus, which is even a little bit higher than your first chorus and so on
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So you're gradually building, but in general you want to have ups and downs until you reach the climax
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which is the end of your song where you maybe have your chorus repeat and it's kind of the crescendo and you really increase the energy there
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So to increase that energy, it can be as simple as just increasing the energy of the percussion
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So this could be like layering drums or maybe adding a faster pattern that really increases energy
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It could also just be adding more layers of instruments to kind of make a bigger sound
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All right. Mistake number two that makes your song sound a little bit more amateurish is overloading
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the highs so that you get a really harsh sound or overloading the lows or low mids. So you get
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kind of a muddy sound. So this could be a mixing problem or an arrangement problem. But one thing
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you might want to consider is just simplifying your arrangement. So you don't have too many
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frequencies going on in those ranges to begin with. Right. So when you have your highs, this is kind
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of another problem getting into you want to kind of leave room for your vocal and then right You you really your low lows Those are really only you only really want your base and your kick in that range and then you got that ugly kind of low mid around like like 250 to 350 where you get a lot of mud and you want to keep kind of stuff out of that range
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and so that moves me on to error number three which is your vocals kind of getting buried in
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your mix they don't really sit on top now my mentor i learned from who has been a mixing
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engineer for decades and he owns his own commercial recording studio. He likes to have everything kind
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of blend together, including the vocal, have the vocal be kind of just one of the instruments and
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that's fine, but you still have to understand and the vocal still has to be clear and cut through
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the mix, whatever you're doing. So that's really the main part of any song is the vocal. So you're
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going to make sure that you make room for your vocals. So again, that's making sure you don't
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have instruments competing in the arrangement in that high end. Or if you do want to have something
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there, have it maybe duck down, maybe have it even have it side chain to your vocal so that it
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decreases in volume when the vocal comes in and rises back up. That's also how you get some more
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of that dynamics there. And that's really more of a mixing dynamics thing, which I'll get to in a
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second, because right now we're covering just arrangement issues, but also just arranging your
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song so that you leave space for the vocals there in the high end. Now, another mistake that
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beginners tend to make is not layering their main sound, especially vocals. This is something you
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don't necessarily have to do. I've seen a lot of people get away without layering their main vocal
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This is something, for example, Bono with U2, he was never able to kind of repeat the same
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melody when he sang. So he was always just singing with just the one vocal track for the main melody
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But of course, they have background vocals and other layered vocals in their songs. This is
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another thing I've seen with The Midnight, which is one of my favorite bands or synthwave band
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One of their tutorials, they show that they just used one straight vocal for the lead. But another
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thing I'm going to consider though in a lot of pop music, right, and a lot of professional sounding
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music is a lot of layered vocals, not just the background vocals, but also the lead vocals are
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layered. You've got not just the same part layered and then panned left and right, but you also have
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like harmonies layered in there as well, you know, either singing lower or higher that maybe like the
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casual listener might not even notice, but if they're not there, it makes a big difference. So
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having all those layers really helps add that professional feel and sound to your music
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And the same thing is kind of true if you have just like a lead instrument, having different
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layers or harmonies accompanying that also really increases that sound, that richness
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All right and another arrangement mistake is having just too much going on I really liked what Pogo had to say about this He an Australian music producer and he had a really good tutorial on how to make music and just in general and I link to that
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below. But he talks about how if you're using too many colors, right, if you think about every
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instrument as a color and if you're using too many colors they tend to just blend together and you
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get brown rather than a beautiful painting with all these different colors in it. So sometimes less
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is more with music. A lot of times less is more. I mean, you think about it in the olden days
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where, you know, a lot of people consider the golden, the golden days of music. They only had
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so many tracks to work with, right? You have those eight track tapes. And even before then
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you only had like four tracks to work with and you'd have to like set those aside and duplicate
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and so on. So you had, you're really limited on how many tracks you can use back in the day and
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they still made great music. So you don't need a ton of tracks and a ton of different things going
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on to make a great song. One final arrangement mistake that I have noticed is that there's no
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real hook to a song, meaning you keep waiting for it to build. You keep waiting for that kind of
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release in energy or release in tension that your verses are supposed to kind of create
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but it never really kind of releases, never kind of gets to that main crescendo
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And so that's something you might want to consider too, is are you really building those big
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hooks that are so prevalent in music today and in popular professional music
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All right, those are the arrangement mistakes. Now let's go into mixing, some mixing mistakes
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And one is just having your mix is just too narrow. It's narrow
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This is a big thing that I struggled with early on is just kind of forgetting about that panning knob
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And really when it comes down to when you listen to a lot of music, there is a lot of panning
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Almost every instrument is panned somewhere in the frequency spectrum, except for like your kick drum, your bass and like your lead instrument or your main vocal
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So you want to have things panned in your mix. You're taking advantage of that stereo space
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Otherwise, you're not really creating a stereo mix. You're creating a mono mix if everything is just straight down the middle
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Another big mixing mistake is just using too much reverb that really clutters things up and you lose clarity
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and you get some muddiness as well. So another part of that is not EQing reverb. So another thing
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to consider is EQing all of your reverbs. So you're only getting that reverb space that you
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want. And typically you kind of want it more in the mid range. You don't really want a lot of
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reverb in the low end because that can create mud and then too much reverb in the high end
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you lose clarity So that another thing is maybe dialing back on the reverb and also EQing your reverb Another mixing mistake is just not having a dynamic mix right So you got all your panning set up
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you've got all your effects set up, but do they change over time
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You want everything to change over time over the course of your song, right
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So you've got your arrangement that's changing, but you also want your mix changing over time
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So this could be, for example, panning, so changing the panning of things
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having things move back and forth across the spectrum. This is especially handy when you're doing transitions
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Another thing could be just automating. So for example, you might automate your volume
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So you might have like the volume, you might actually automate the volume of your choruses
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to be a dB or dB and a half louder than your verses
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And that also can help with that energy and that feel of building up to a crescendo
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Another thing is the use of high and low pass filters, right? So you might have kind of lower energy of your songs where maybe you cut out some of
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the low end and then you build up to that, you know, that climax, that chorus where
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you know, the bass hits and then you got that full energy going on
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Same thing with you might high cut something that also removes energy if you are taking
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away the high end and you're using a low pass filter. And that's especially, especially common in electronic music, having that filter opening up
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But that's just the beginning. There's so much you can do with automation. And that is a big part of what can make your mix sound a lot more professional is just having a lot of things changing and going on subtly
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Kind of, you know, maybe a lot of people might not even notice it, right? The casual listener. But if it's not there, it's just kind of seems stale and bland
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So those are my tips then for making that amateur sounding song sound professional
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So that's a lot to keep in mind. If you want help mixing your songs so you can get those commercial quality radio ready
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sounding songs quickly, then be sure to grab my rapid song finishing checklist in the description below
10:23
And this will walk you through a proven step-by-step process for mixing and mastering your songs
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so you can start releasing more high quality music. All right, if you found this video helpful, feel free to drop a like, subscribe, and let me know in
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the comments below what genre of music do you make. This can be just your big umbrella genre
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or even get super specific on what kind of micro genre of music you make. I'm curious to know. So
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let me know in the comments. Otherwise, have a great day and I'll see you in a future video
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