I think melodically, this is a gorgeous song! Your sense of melody and harmony are really developed. I think your lead synth and all the little accent sounds are great. The level balance of your sounds are actually fine, so you don't have to worry about that with your mix - the issue is the quality of your sounds and the number of sounds that are happening.

There are a number of distinct melodic ideas happening at the same time (not even counting the different rhythms in your percussion), and it's hard for my ears to figure out what to pay attention to - I have a feeling that the arpeggio is the focal element, so you should try and simplify everything else to just live around that and save all the other ideas for accents or bridges or other songs!

Certain sounds also just sort of stuck out like a sore thumb - your hi hat and snare really caught my attention. The snare sounds like it's being distorted or bit crushed and doesn't fit in the mix, and there is an extremely sharp and piercing high end to that hi hat that needs to be tamed (take an EQ, boost the volume a single node with a high Q and sweep around until you hear that super painful ringing in the high end - it'll resonate really strongly and you can just pull back on that or cut it alltogether).

I would also suggest taking some time to study the song structures of other artists that you enjoy listening to - pull them into your DAW and use markers to divide up each section, then use empty MIDI clips to try and mark off each sound as it enters and leaves. Try to figure out how the song flows, and how many sounds are playing in each section. See if you can apply that to your own production!


And with loudness/mastering, it's really just a matter of mixing your song well (it doesn't matter if you're leaving .5 dB of headroom or 3 dB or 6 dB or 12 dB - as long as you aren't clipping into your master, you're fine) and then putting a limiter on your master and either decreasing the threshold or increasing the input gain until it sounds as loud as possible without sounding like it's changing the song itself (i.e. distortion). There are certain tricks you can do to nudge it louder and louder each time, but at its core there's no real secret.

As long as you're actively comparing the song you're working on to professional tracks before you finish your song instead of just comparing your finished work with the finished works of others, you'll get there.

Can't wait to hear your next track!