Some of you have made a song and wondered why it didn't sound like a professional recording or why one song sounded more legit then the other. So I am going to tell you a few things on how to make a song or sound better.

The first step would be something called spacial positioning. The reason why studios are set up the way they are is so that the waves are played off speakers and hit the walls to bounce away form the engineer sitting right in the middle. he needs to have the left and right speaker perfectly in in a triangle or a V from where he is sitting. Why? Because they do that to build a auditory illusion of when you listen to the song that it feels you are watching the band right in front of you. When you have a song, each track should be panned as if you were looking at a band on stage or you are the band on stage looking out, or an orchestra where people are sitting in chairs. lets say you have a simple track with Bass guitar and Drums. The first thing you would do is record the drums. if you want to get super nity,grity,hardcore,producer,multi-billion dollar precise. you would edit the drums to be directly in the pocket of the beat before recording bass. But for now we wont do that. next is bass and then over it is lets say guitar rhythm doubled. Now for the guitar track, no guitarist when playing is usually sitting directly in front of you playing. He is usually off to the sides. For me I usually do it like looking at the band. So would pan guitar tracks to the right of the track just a air to give that illusion. Bass you can leave in center or you can pan to the left. But most of the times bass is there to keep time and the groove and isn't doing much embellishment for you to pan it. This is your choice though. The biggest problem I see is drums. Because even when the drums are usually right in the center. you still need to pan every part of the drum accordingly. if you have a drum fill going from left to right you need to make sure the drums are panned left to right which the correct parts of the drum. You don't want your drums playing a hi-hat when its dead in the center. You want to replicate that the drummer is in front of you and playing nicely. So of course you can have the kick right in the middle as well as the snare and make sure crash/hi-hats/cymbals/rides/chinas etc are all panned if being used in the tracks, as well as the toms he if rolls or fills. This will give a more full live surround feeling in a mix.

The second part I want to talk about is Eq and compression. Let me just say, to be safe. That you will 95% to 99% need to apply a EQ or compressor to every track you have. not every track is gonna be so superb in timbre for you to use it. Also you need to eq accordingly so you don't kills some ones dynamic hearing be having  an extremely high note go off in the ear. Make sure you separate tracks and eq and compress accordingly. You don't want to put all of the drum parts on one track and increase bass kick with an eq because then when the crash is it, it will sound like someone is laying a hand on it or something. You need to be able to maintain that Christmas and head room with the crash. Compression is the one thing you need into making your mix sound "tighter" you need to have this where in case I have heard mixes where the mass and drums sound nice and all of a sudden about 30 db louder then the drums comes a guitar track that blew my ears away. I wont get into compressor too much to explain to you just know that you should maintain a threshold that doesn't blow speakers and hears and manipulate the ratio accordingly to how you want it and how it "fits" into your mix.