Hello guys, I’m asking some advice to get my tracks louder so I can get them accepted on here, still trying on logos till i get the required quality but till now i hear my tracks not the same quality of the songs here… the steps i follow generally are:: 1.composition after setting target or genre/type/mood.
2.changing midi to audio and recording between -6 to -18 db.
3-bus routing each track to stereo bus, output all busses to headphones.
4-applying compression and eq maybe reverb and delay if needed and panning instruments if needed and adjusting levels to be suitable that all instruments sound good, all levels sound similar no instrument covering the other and visually eq so no 2 instrument overlap the same frequency.
5-export wav then open in new project and route to stereo bus and apply limiter, stereo image and eq with mastering plugin of ozone, when applying the plugin on track and stereo bus it gets loud near to tracks here but kinda decrease quality.
6-export wav then convert wav to mp3.
still I don’t get my tracks as loud as accepted songs here.
i need some help to improve or some specific steps to get more depths in one of the steps, add or remove something that i do wrong in mix.master process other than composition issues or suitability of content composed i want to reach quality of tracks here.
here my sound cloud if u want to check quality of my songs.
www.soundcloud.com/hesham-kuma.
thanks to you for helping me and giving some of your time guys.
what kind of equipment do you use? sounds of poor quality, do you have good speakers or do you work with headphones? the general spectrum is not consistent, little bass and sounds too aggressive in the mids.
which track you mean because each track i do minor changes because the previous not accepted.
i use sonar producerX3 and duo-capture from roland and everything else plugins if u ask of another thing plz clarify more what equipment u mean… i have studio monitor headphones and dont have monitor left and right speakers.
i am very thankful that you’re trying to help me.
listen to your music on different media, you will quickly find that the equalization is not good. I can’t do better. otherwise the approach you are referring to on the process is a good one.
thanks very much I’ll try using earphones and tv speaker lcd when listening to mix before finalizing.
My advice would be get a frequency analyzer (like Voxengo SPAN for example), and use it religiously until you fully understand the difference in balance between your track and the ones you’re comparing it to on the marketplace.
The frequency analyzer will show you when one or more sounds are way out of balance with the rest of your track. For example, this is from “tech logo preview,” you can see how the ride cymbal peak is way higher than all the other sounds in the song:
It will also show you when your stereo balance as off, for example see the image below from “Classic Logo Preview”:
Once you have the balance down then you can worry about loudness, but if your mix is out of balance then no amount of mastering plugins is going to get it sounding the way you want. The more imbalanced it is, the harder it will be to achieve the target loudness.
“Preview Mp3 Wm Louder” is actually not too bad, with some subtle FX sounds in the background, it might get accepted. The glitch sound at the end is nice, you just need some more stuff like that to make it interesting, otherwise it’s just a marimba with ping pong delay which is a bit too simple even for this platform.
If you listen to example logos even in the most simple ones, you’ll still hear a lot of subtle background pads, sweeps, impacts, glitch sounds, etc. throughout the track to help it catch the listener’s ear. It’s very rare to hear a logo get accepted that’s just 1 or 2 instruments alone with no background sounds.
Anyway I hope some of this helps, I think in some ways logos are more challenging than full songs because you only have 10-15 secs to draw the listener in… so the mix quality, sound selection, and arrangement all have to be really good in order for the logo to be successful.
Listening to your tracks I think you would get better result if you don’t do any processing of your sounds. Keep everything as midi and set the balance right and mix down to a stereo track.
There are also some issues with your sound sources. Most of your instruments sounds bad, but it’s hard to say if that’s due to your mixing or the samples themselves. What DAW are you using? And sampled instruments?
You should also pay more attention to your general performance of your music.
thanks very much, ill spend more time understanding eq types and ill make practice on frequency analyzer more to match more with ref tracks, thank you very much for the help. i already have voxengo but I’ll go in depth more with its parameters and understanding the balance u mentioned for loudness to use it right because apparently i use it wrong or i dont understand it much so I’ll study it more and ill work on tech logo to make all track together(lower cymbal freq and raise the lower freq a bit between 400 and 800) maybe this way the image will be more glue together because honestly it looks horrible when compared to more professionally mixed songs that look all glued together like brick
i use sonar x3 producer edition, i use roland groove synth mostly and izotope iris for scratch and fx sound like it, i record midi by setting output to soundcard of laptop and record with audio track which its input is the output from laptop soundcard, i think maybe it sound bad due to eq because the songs look very bad in voxengo span in the previous reply of @add9audio
anyway if you have more tips i will be very happy to hear and thanks very much for sharing your opinions
Why do you record the midi output to audio? That doesn’t make sense.
do you think i keep midi as it is and do mix, blance, eq that way? i change midi to audio so it sound more real not synthetic, if u know better way to make midi more real plz tell me brother.
thank you and all brothers @add9audio @ED-MusicProductions for help i really appreciate and respect you guys and i will listen to your songs to try improve myself with your tips.
Changing it to audio doesn’t make it sound more real. Eq and compression doesn’t either. Don’t do anything to the sound unless you have to. Depending on the source sometimes some reverb will give you a more realistic sound. That’s my experience anyway 
thank you i will try that and thank very much for your replies brother
No problem, good luck!
@Hyperprod please bro im sorry for disturbing again, you mean i export my mix as midi after comp and eq etc or freeze midi to audio instead of recording it through sound card ?
Keep midi as midi and mix your track. Do as little as possible with eq and compression. When your mix is ready you export your song as a stereo wav track. I haven’t used Sonar so I don’t know exactly how it works, but this is how I do it with Logic. Just ask if there’s anything else, I’m glad to help if I can.
thanks brother, i haven’t used logic either but in some video lessons i see all DAW are similar but i get what u mean exactly and I’ll try to improve my mixes as much as possible and resubmit, i ordered left right monitor today to make variety with monitor headphones to get best result in judgments i make in mix and hopefully i can work to reach quality similar to yours in sound soon, btw i listened to some of your uploads and they really are very good in terms of quality and as composition too.
thanks very much brother for help.
also i did not use parallel compression using post fader sends i think that trick will make louder mixes with better quality than adding ozone 9 twice in mastering, but what I’m not sure of is do i compress my main track slightly then do heavy compression in send or i just do slight eq in the main track with no compression at all.
Sorry for my many questions here, i just want to earn living licencing tracks instead of being pharmacist, i have long experience with composition and started using DAW long time ago but didn’t give much time studying all parameters, tools, and steps that’s why my mixes sound bad and I’m kinda lost.
I will be great ful if you help me with this or any other artist reading this post.
Thanks to all brothers who gave me some of their valuable time and all your help is appreciated.