Ableton Forum

Can anyone help explain the main reason my tracks are still not sounding as bright and loud as professional quality tracks? My tracks still sound a bit muffled and overall are quieter than most professional tracks - just dont have the same oomf!

I believe a lot of it is do to EQing and Compression, but I am not sure what my problem is - not enough of these? Too much of these? Putting these in the wrong spot?

A few things of note - 1) my master channel during the drop of my song is peaking around -3db. I am leaving headroom on purpose in order to have space to master, and 2) side by side images of wave form comparison on my track and a pro track in Serato show a pretty big difference. I have left myself some head room on the master channel in order to finish mastering with a service such as Landr, but even after mastering with Landr you can see from the wave forms that mine lacks the dynamic range of the professional track.

Any tips on what I might need to do or look into would be much appreciated!

Can anyone help explain the main reason my tracks are still not sounding as bright and loud as professional quality tracks?

Main reason is probably because you are not a professional in this area. If it was easy to make your work sound as full and professional using your gear at home and youtube as your teacher, there would be no interest in a $50K+ masters degree in audio engineering. Even artists that do most of the production themselves will enlist a professional engineer at some point to get that last bit out.

There are things that will get you 95% of the way there, but getting that all important professional sound across different devices and platforms requires that extra 5% of knowledge and that is the hardest part.

To get close to your goal you need some time to learn about dynamics and processing them using compressors, multi-band dynamics, selective EQ, referencing, mono balancing of low frequencies and all that technical stuff that I barely understand myself.

Other option if you want to maintain your sanity is to get your mix about right, leave your headroom then contact a suitably qualified master engineer and pay them for the rest of the process. You can sometimes learn a few things from them as they can often advise you of where you may need to make changes for things to work better.

Others may have some other advice but that's the general opinion tho if you have time and want to learn, there are many tutorials out there you can sink time into.