Hey James!
Firstly, welcome, we are happy to have you! AJ is a pretty wonderful place to be. I am by no means a professional but I will try and give you some thoughts on your track, hopefully some of it will be helpful.
Basically, they are saying that you can only resubmit the song if you make some MAJOR changes. So simply changing the mix or master probably wouldn’t be enough.
Don’t read too much into the reasons they gave for rejection, they just use one or two standard phrases as a blanket response for hard rejections.
Composition:
At first glance your song sounds right, but as it goes on it becomes apparent that the track doesn’t really commit to one idea or sound.
The soft, sustained piano theme sounds fairly sentimental/romantic, but then these upbeat drums are thrown in there, with this slightly melancholy glockenspiel melody, and some hand claps. It just kind of ends up reading as a little confused, thematically.
The theme is not only incredibly short (1 bar), but also rhythmically uninteresting. This would not be an issue if it were played a bit faster on some guitar harmonics with heavy delay, but just as a piano it becomes very repetitive. Even something as simple as replacing your C-E-G-E-C-E-F-E melody with something along the lines of (not necessarily this exactly) C-E-G-E-D-E-D-C every 8th bar (or whatever the last bar of your ‘phrase’ is) would do a lot to break up the monotony. Another way would be to make the melody a bit more rhythmically original, so that it would sound a bit more fresh right off the bat.
Mixing/Mastering:
There are definitely some issues with the mix. The whole song sounds kind of flat. Dynamically there isn’t anything happening. The bass notes are at times too soft and don’t seem to be balanced well with the kick, which can cause a lot of low-end muddiness problems. The drums are also bit too up front for the kind of track this is.
I’m not sure if you can hear it, but you have this kind of pulsating effect going on in your track. This is probably due to the low-end being a bit messed up. There are some great tutorials out there for fixing those problems.
There’s a lot of ‘empty space’ here, that is begging to be filled. Some of that could be fixed by more/different instruments, but some of that is going to come down to the mastering and mixing as well.
Overview:
I’ve said this quite a few tracks recently, but I think it really applies perfectly to yours. I think the major problem here is just the lack of commitment to any one particular sound. It really just doesn’t feel like any particular genre category for AJ. If you want it upbeat then make it upbeat - add some electric guitars or synths or driving bass! If you want it romantic then make it romantic - add some strings or acoustic guitars! If you want it somewhere in the middle you’ve got to make sure every single element of the track shines. Also I would watch some mixing/mastering tutorials. You didn’t do a terrible job on it here, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement in those aspects.
I would also think about the instruments. Make sure they all make sense together, and that they all help to support your main theme. And also think about how each instrument you use is going to contribute to the song in terms of frequency. You don’t want too many instruments competing with each other for a certain frequency range. You have to balance the highs with the mids with the lows.
As always when I write these things I was kind of rambling, so sorry if some parts are incoherent. Let me know if you have any questions regarding clarification of what I said or just concerns with what I said at all. You may disagree with all of it and that’s fine, these are just my personal thoughts on the song. Hopefully it wasn’t too harsh, honestly I think you have a pretty decent track here that is just a stones throw away from being great. Anyways good luck with future submissions!
. I can definitely relate to your comments about mixing and mastering, as this is an area I know I have to work on a lot more, I’m still quite a beginner when it comes to mixing/mastering. Also as I was reading your comment about composition, I didn’t realize the facts you pointed out in the process of creating this track. It’s really helpful to hear a perspective of other musician and your comments are definitely insightful. Thanks again, I wish you good luck with all your musical endeavours!