Ok, I have been producing for about 8 months now and I have learned quite a bit and I feel my music production / quality is decent.  One thing that I cannot figure out for the life of me is how other producers get such crisp, sonically clear music?  Ex.  anything posted by MrSuicideSheeep / Diversity Promo , etc.  The music is super crystal clear.  How are they achieving this?  I feel I have a somewhat decent understanding or EQ, but is it really just the EQ that is making their music so crisp, or am I missing something? 

^ +1
The trick with EQing is to make sure the spectrum isn't too empty, or too full, in each band. Too much low mids, for example, makes a track sound thin and weak, even with sub support, but too much makes it muddy and unpleasant. What does each part need?
Arrangement helps with this too; if there are two basses at once, why not cut one? Or put them in different parts of the mix?
You can do this with just stock plugins. Except arrangement, you don't need any plugins for that.
(Can confirm this is enough to get on Diversity btw)

Don't forget layering. A lot of sounds you'll hear in professional tracks are not just one synthesizer/patch. They can sometimes be 3 to 5! Then they are meticulously sculpted and fit together with EQ and maybe "glued" together with compression to create the illusion of one sound.

Thanks for all of the responses and good information.  Looks like this is something that is achieved through more understanding of how to properly place elements within the full spectrum with minimal clashing, like everyone has mentioned.  One thing I did do however, was purchase Serum to replace Massive.  The sounds that come out of Serum are sooo much higher in quality than massive.  So hopefully that could help me some as well.  Lastly, I feel that having more experience and a better trained ear is ultimately what is going to get me to the next level one day.  I am pretty happy with my current production state only being about 8 months in, I cant expect greatness just yet!

Anyways, thanks again everyone for the advice, and being able to point me in the right direction!

Cheers.

Quote from: Neutrin05 on March 29, 2016, 03:32:31 am

One thing I did do however, was purchase Serum to replace Massive.  The sounds that come out of Serum are sooo much higher in quality than massive.  So hopefully that could help me some as well.

A saw is a saw. Ultimately, equipment doesn't make the mix as much as the mind and, more importantly, ears, operating it.

The only thing I would add to this is that different synthesizers have different methods of generating oscillators. Depending on how Serum generates a sawtooth waveform, it could be tonally different from Massive due to whichever single-cycle saw waveform Massive uses in their wavetable. Some synths have brighter or fuzzier sawtooth single-cycle waveforms; others have more dull or bodied ones.

There's a really good write-up at KVR about how Sylenth1 and Hive share a similar method of saw oscillator generation based on note and frequency. It also shows how a lot of synth developers go beyond just the basic coded sawtooth generation by raw numbers. https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=427890

Sorry to hi-jack!