1. A/B! it's the fastest and easiest way to make your mix better, especially if you don't have the ear training to hear what's wrong with your mix by itself

2. Finish your tracks! As many as you can! Even if you're just copy and pasting a bunch and then calling it done, that's better than not having a finished chune to reflect on. I know so many newbie producers who just don't finish anything so they don't get any better.

3. Don't start releasing music until you're sure about it. You might regret it later lol.

I was talking to some Rogue in a WoW dungeon in 2010 about music and he asked me if I had heard of dubstep. At the time the only electronic music I knew about was Pendulum and S3RL type stuff. He told me to check out Datsik - Nuke 'Em and it blew my fucking mind. Immediately I was like "I love this, I need to do this." Moved on from dubstep pretty fast but it was a good entry point.

imo just don't bother panning then. a lot of people who aren't deaf in one ear don't pan at all, in edm it's pretty common. mix with your left and right merged so you can hear if things are stereo phasing badly, then reverb/dimension expand everything to taste and just leave it. if something sounds too dry and stark, add a bit of reverb. most decent reverb plugins initialize with a good neutral amount of width, so if you just unmerge your mix before you render you should be okay!

all that said, i would recommend just having a go-to person to check if your stereo is okay and then follow whatever track-specific advice they give you. good luck!

Usually I go with a 'more is more' approach.. after finishing arrangement and writing I'll identify what is important (usually the main melody, chords, bass, kick snare and hat) and mix them all to play nice on their own. then I'll unmute the arps and harmony and sfx and all the extra stuff and try to get them as present as I can without having them overpower my important stuff. Then I'll try to master it, and everything will go to shit, and I will have to readjust everything again.

Quote from: psychictype on January 06, 2016, 07:55:01 am

Pro-Q 2 to cut below 30hz, OTT on 5-10%, Ableton Utility automating the gain here and there to make hype sections hype, and AOM Invisible Limiter.

AOM Invisible Limiter is a godsend. Any particular reason you cut below 30hz though?

most systems can't produce anything 30hz, and most people can't really hear below 30hz either. usually i have my kick and sub tuned higher than that anyway, so the only information i have under 30 is dist artefacting that eats my headroom or gives me DC offset or whatever lol

definitely not your kick, but higher layers of your bass sounds sound good with a bit of reverb! as long as you high pass everything at 500 or 1k and make sure the bus is at a relatively low volume you're good to go

To add to this, there are a ton of different modes, which no one really uses except like classical musicians and stuff. I think they're useful, though, because you can shift between modes in a song to add character. Here's a resource on other modes: http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/guide-to-musical-modes

culprate uses modes all the time, dawg. Scarred is just a standard lydian progression.

I'm not sure if I'm close or not