Realising that a lot of the best stuff takes real hard graft and effort, i.e. spending a day or two editing and Melodyning a vocal meticulously when lots of people would just chuck it in and make do. Actually taking pride in spending lots of time getting things sounding that little bit better. That was the day I went from seeing Noisia as production immortals to just really hard workers.

(I have to add that my second biggest revalation was to chuck all this out of the window at creative times and get a track out onto the screen as quickly as humanly possible )

if you can find such a thing you probably havent been working at music for very long

the main thing is just realizing how much work needs to be done to accomplish what you want.

if i had to nail one thing down i'd say it was paying attention to the quality of
my output chain.

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Ctrls (Token Records) - techno
Northern Structures - techno
2400 Operator - house
Pyro - drum'n'bass

That the little things add up. There is rarely a big single move that takes a track to a new level, its the small barely noticeble things on every track and bus that gets you there.

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Stealing kick drums. Ever since then my production quality has skyrocketed. For some reason a good kick just forces me to asses everything properly (or at least better). Ever since then I tend to make better subs, which lead to better basses, which in turn lead to better treble. I know it's sounds dumb, but I swear the moment I started using kicks from other tracks that were in tune with what I planned on writing, things changed for the much better.

Next step, learn how to make my own kicks that are just as good - I'll get there someday.

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Learning that less is more with distortion/saturation/compression.

Learning proper gain staging (then using multi-band compression to give the mix/buss extra oomph).

Understanding m/s processing.

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Records for sale, Calyx, Noisia, Spor, Hardware, Virus, BSE, Moving Shadow. PM me if you wanna make an offer for multiple items.

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there are probably more than one thing. but biggest and quickest improvment came after switching from studio monitors to cheap headphones..

or so i believe anyway, in an untreated room having studio monitors didnt make much of a difference to me but i had them for years, then going from that to using headphones and suddenly my mixes turned to the better.. so having cheap monitors gave me a better view with a less coloured and mangled sound than my studio monitors ever did.. when i first bought those monitors i did it in a way most newbies do i think, just because of hearing its more "pro" ..and obviously a salesman will not say that they might even be worse than the set of hifi speakers you use at the time because those might fill whatever gap your room has, and then pro monitors can have you come out worse because of being more neutral

so yeah, cheap headphones, lol... but then i have also not tried listening to all that many other setups since i started with them.. so i am still unsure.. more of a feeling i suppose

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Y o u t u b e
M y S p a c e
F a c e b o o k
S o u n d c l o u d

Hi guys, just to clear things up. This isn't a "where is the magic button to make productions sound awesome thread" Naturally the only thing that is going to provide results is dedication, hard work and many hours of trial and error.

I know of a few friends / producers who are continually trying to up their game it's just every now and then somebody stumbles upon something that really takes their productions up a notch whether it's finally understanding how compression works or simple things like adding incidentals to make things more interesting. It's these things that I was looking to be shared in this thread and from the looks of it some interesting things have already been added

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- Stopped using analysers.

- Making sure everything is summed into groups and attenuating all the signals to nill then starting with the most powerful part of the track to mix.

For me, hands down, the biggest improvement came in proper gain staging. I spent most of my first year doing typical noob mistakes (not that I'm perfect now mind you) and just stacking vsts/samples up with no thought to gain staging...since I didn't know it existed.

I read a thread on a Dubstep site that had a couple pros get into GS and how and why to do it properly. It was like someone turned a light bulb on for me. So I read up on it in depth.

When I went back through my early tracks that I'd just winged it on and redid them with my newfound knowledge, it was like someone them took a blanket off my speakers. Clarity increased dramatically, drums nit harder..."everything" got better...dramatically better. I had stuff so screwed up it was insane.

The second best thing was in setting my room up to the best of my financial ability, though that really should have been the first thing I ever did. Live and learn.