Getting a 'polished' track. How?

[HoogerJ]

I don't know if there is a certain term for it, but I am struggling to deliver my tunes with a polish. I don't know if it is called polish, but what I mean is that your track is overall reverby, with a solid low end sounding wide and airy (but centered of course). And al the elements standing out on their own, bu sounding tight all together. I work with Ableton 8 on a Mac, no hardware (except reference speakers and usb presonus soundcard)

I'm not a total noob, so I know a thing or two about mixing levels, compression and stuff. My tracks sound oke (there's one in my sig), but I really have a hard time getting them to sound 'professional'. I am well aware that professional tunes get treated by mastering pro's with a lot of soft- and hardware before they are released. But there are a lot of guys, just like me producing at home, who produce better and more 'polished' sounding tracks.

Couple of examples:

This guy Dubbacle has some great overall quality:

Soundcloud

And on a professional level, Noisia:

Soundcloud


Both tracks have weight, but sound light and airy, even in the low end. Any tips/tricks are welcome! Cheers!

[Crimsonghost]

Usually the term "Polished" refers to being over produced and/or having no flaws.

The best examples would be to take any modern rock/metal band and compaire them to someone like Zepplin or the Stones. Most modern music has (flawless playing and punchy production (i.e "Polished"), where the aforementioned have raw sounding production with sloppy (albeit soulful) playing.

Long story short, as you get better at mixing youre tracks with sound more pro (polished).

[Crimsonghost]

Btw, i just listened to youre track, and while im not going to give you a ton of advice on it (theres a thread for that), i will tell you to balance youre levels. That snare and lead are loud as shit and the bass and kick are lost.

And trying to compare stuff to Noisia is silly. Its like claiming you know how the Skrillex base is made. Its stuff that just takes a LOT of practice and will come to you eventually. Those guys are all super (music) tech nerds with way too much free time on there hands. Thats how you get good.

[HoogerJ]

A lot of free time...

See, there's where I went wrong. Appreciate the feedback. Cheers!

[HoogerJ]

Any other thoughts?

[__________]

You can't polish a turd






























unless you varnish it first

[outbound]

When I think of polish I used to think high-end (like air at around 15-20kHz)

Now When I hear it I think in terms of your ideal polished mix is already there. However in front of it is this blurry curtain maybe a dirty window. And this layer is stopping you from hearing that polished mix as it should be. What you need to do it clean it up. So some frequencies will stick out more than they should, this will push the rest of the mix back in comparison so reducing these areas can let the rest of the mix come forwards. There are some parts of the mix that sit too far back as well behind this polished mix. If you use compression then you can push everything back to where these things are and then use makeup gain to bring everything forwards.

I understand this is probably a very different answer to what you might need but working on mastering everyday this is how I see things when I am working on tracks, it is more a case of bringing things forwards (however keeping depth in there otherwise things can sound very flat very quick)

Oh and it starts right form sample selection and arrangement all the way up through mixing and finally mastering. Make sure to get everything right at each stage!

[HoogerJ]

Thanks for the comment, Outbound. Just like Crimsonghost, you're actually saying that it takes time and experience to get every step of the process right. Maybe it's just me being impatient. Started two years ago with producing, in my sparse free time, so sometimes I feel like I'm missing a magic wand. But there is none. it's practice, practice, practice.

And thanks for the constructive criticism, €10 Bag.

[Bass_Jacka]

You can't polish a turd

unless you varnish it first

Exactly this, even though it's a crude way of putting it! lol. But to the point and spot on. If your levels are all fucked, and you haven't eq'd each element properly so it all has its own space in the frequency spectrum, there's nothing you'll be able to do to 'polish' your tracks.

[AxeD]

It's called audio engineering for a reason

[HoogerJ]

So it's safe to say that if you polish a turd, it will get very messy.

[Crimsonghost]

You can't polish a turd

unless you varnish it first

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

[Eskimo]

Get some Poles to help you with it

[HoogerJ]

LOL. Okay, okay, okay, stop taking the piss....

[GregoryTJ]

[Aufnahmewindwuschel]

[HoogerJ]

This thread is beyond saving, is it?

[frenchboy]

There's no one trick dude. You learn little things everyday. It takes like 10 years to become an "advanced" mixing engineer. And even then you'll still learn new stuff all the time. And no one's gonna look at your track, you gotta learn yourself. I can guess from looking at the waveform of your song that it has a lot of resonant peaks in the lows and low mids, use more EQs and Buss EQs to take them out. Using a bit of compression on most of your sounds and on your busses might help with that as well. I use presets for compression and A/B a bunch of them to see what sounds best, I have like 20 plugins all with presets on them. Also looks like you used a lot of limiting or saturation to compensate for those resonant peaks. I use about 1-3db of saturation on the master and 1-3db of limiting afterwards, more than that just ruins the track for me. But see that's just my opinion and what I usually hear in my tracks. Everyone does things their own way.

[HoogerJ]

Thx for the advice, Frenchboy. I know there is not a quick fix or something. But getting feedback like yours will get me there, eventually. It's good to read about all different approaches, really learning from that.

[ChromaRhythm]

Tone2 Akustix, Sausage Fattener, iZotope Ozone 5, a good reverb like RP-Verb, EQing, etc.

those are my "go-to" plugins