I need a LOT of help on the production end of things

[Incinerator Drone]

Basically I've been writing music for 10+ years, but until a few years ago it was all for punk rock bands and such, where all I was really doing was the actual song writing, and outside of getting my amp set up and messing with a few effect pedals, I pretty much never did anything on the production end.

Electronic music is a lot different, I write a song and that's just the start. But then I'm never quite sure where to go from there. I read Zircon's remixing thread, which helps sort of on a general level, but I'm still pretty clueless about how to put this stuff into action and people say vague things like "you just have to start trying things out on your own" but it's like ok... where to begin? I know there is no set path for any given song, but on the other hand, my brother came in once and was listening to this totally raw song of mine and spent like 15 minutes on it and made it sound 100% better. So there have to be some general concepts I'm missing.

Now, for one specific thing that confuses me. I'm always told that with each sound to never let it get into the red. Ok. But then I end up with a VERY QUIET mix. And I've been told what you do from there is to put a limit on it and boost the gain. So I bring my .wav file into Audition, add hard limiting to I dunno... -3 db? And then boost input slowly by 1 db or so each time to get to a decent overall volume but...

It still gets distorted.

So then I feel kind of stuck like, even putting aside the fact that there are a million things I don't understand about getting good sound quality, I can't even figure out how to make my final mixes the correct volume.

So for instance, here is a clip I am working on where the final mix stays out of the red (though to be honest the drums still get up in the red a bit on their individual levels, my drums are always WAY higher in the red than everything else) and it is very, very quiet...

http://www.negativeworld.org/mymusic/electronic/bittriptest3.mp3

And here it is at a more appropriate volume, but this was being up in the red...

http://www.negativeworld.org/mymusic/electronic/bittriptest2.mp3

I'm not really sure how to get the first to be the second while staying out of the red.

[Legion303]

Ask your brother to show you what he did with your song. There's no substitute for hands on experience.

If you're having trouble getting the mix right because you keep concentrating on the loudness, try turning your speakers up so the final level isn't a factor to your brain, then mix the individual levels so everything's balanced the way you want, THEN turn your speakers back down and start adding effects.

-steve

[No Escape]

This is a good place to start, and I'm sure you'll receive a wealth of helpful tips here. I'll shoot a tip as well- When you're using something like a hard limiter or a wave hammer, you are essentially just applying gain and compression. This can be very helpful for raising the overall volume of the track, but if there are instruments that are leveled too high, the compressor will clamp down on them and cause distortion (though the level will still be below 0Db). Essentially, that instrument will be quieter (or unchanged) in volume, but the sine wave is clipped, forming a square wave, and hence distortion. This all a very technical way of saying "make sure nothing is over-leveled in your song when you mixdown." Good luck!

DJGea- Your post is spam. Please don't do that in the forums. Relevant posts and links only.

[Rozovian]

This is what I got out of it, with some serious bass reduction and other eq changes, a 10dB boost, and some limiting (0.1ms lookahead, 2ms release, -0.1dB ceiling) followed by normalizing. No transient processing, multiband maximizer whatever stuff going on, just eq and a limiter.

(tw no esc, don't reply to spammers, just report them)

[DarkSim]

Make sure your master channel doesn't have reverb turned up to 55% wet and 800ms delay.

...this may or may not have caused me some embarrassment today wondering why this one song I was working on sounded so much quieter and muddier than all my other ones...