5 Steps to Better Sounding Songs
By Arthur Papanastasiou

We are expanding our Indie Artist Insider series to include guest blogs from industry professionals
and artists from our SongCast family of indie artists.
Click this link to view the first 100 episodes of the Indie Artist Insider. 

Here is our latest guest blog, featuring Arthur Papanastasiou.  Thank you Arthur for sharing your expertise and insight. 

5 Steps To Better Sounding Songs:

I remember listening to a few recordings of original music I had helped write from my younger days. The thing that really struck me was I thought that they sounded immature, and I knew they were. It really bothered me at first, and I wanted to know why they sounded that way to me. The chords were alright. Even the choruses had some nice hooks. Overall, they were ok but were lacking something. What was it? The more I thought about what was wrong, the clearer things became in my mind. The ideas were solid, but the writing and recording processes we followed skipped a few essentials that could make a huge impact on the final product.

I know we can all relate to being our own worst critics, but this was different. I knew that my ear had matured because I could hear right away that the songs were just not quite there. They needed some help. If you’ve ever felt this way about your own music, know that there are several simple things you can do to vastly improve your results, giving your tunes a much more polished and “radio-ready” sound.

1.  The Arrangement

Start with an honest review of the arrangement. Song structures vary wildly and that’s ok. Your genre combined with your style can make each artist sound unique and differentiated. Maybe you like to begin with an intro and start the vocals with the first verse. Maybe you start with half a chorus as many do today. Once you get the general structure of the song the way you hear it, the one thing I have learned over the years that makes the biggest difference to me is in the use of transitions.

Many songs run one section into another without any transitions at all. Sometimes this works fine, but many times a transition between that intro and first verse would change the feel from what I heard in my own tunes – immaturity – and instead add a more professional ‘feel’ to the flow. You’ll need to try it to know if your song would benefit from adding a transition.

A transition can be a simple run with the drums or a bar or two that fits between the song sections that adds interest and can prepare the listener for the upcoming change. A common transition is a 2 bar hold at the end of a chorus. You can hear this example in Richard Myles’ new song, ‘The Moment I Fell In Love’ when Will Chase sings that very line.

Transitions provide a moment of release after building excitement or tension, and they often add a very nice touch to a song.

2.  The Tracks

Similarly, the tracks themselves have a huge impact on the final sound. There isn’t enough time or space in this short article to cover the dos and don’ts if you are recording live. Let’s just say that your microphone placements, and your signal strength will matter a lot. You don’t need to record a ‘hot’ signal as was necessary back in the 2-inch tape days, but you do need to record as good a quality sound as you can. This will make a huge difference in the final sound. If you’re not using a mic and are recording ‘direct,’ you should try to use a direct box. One additional note about the sound quality. You need to know what the sound should be. Try to record the sound so it is as close to what you need on the recording. I suggest you try to ‘shape’ the sound so that it will require the least amount of processing later during the mix. 

With my own tracks, the guitars were muddy, and they needed a totally different approach. Hindsight is sometimes so clear.

If you are creating electronic music from pre-recorded sounds and loops, these often have been processed and usually will sound great. Again, I suggest you choose wisely, especially with keyboard and drum sounds, as these will dictate the tone and the feel of the entire track.

3.  Mixing, Levels, and EQ

Once you have the core sounds it’s time to create a rough mix. At this stage, it may be productive to pay a mixing engineer to create the mix for you. If you have the mixing skills, a good computer, and the right software and plugins, good on ya mate! Go for it. If not, a mixing engineer will take your tracks and stems and create a mix that sounds professional and full where that’s needed and will be balanced in its dynamics and balanced in its sound equalization.

A good mix will sound comfortable and natural, not forced or over-processed (unless that’s what you want). It begins with the most important task of gain-staging the levels of each individual track. When properly gain-staged, your tracks and stems will each have an optimized signal so that a balanced ‘raw’ mix is possible. A well gain-staged and well-mixed song will begin to sound fantastic without any processing or without much processing at all. This is where to spend time in the mixing process. The most productive time mixing is typically in the setup and raw mixing process.

Then, once you have a solid raw mix, the next steps involve correcting and possibly removing frequencies that need to be lowered with EQ, compressing where the dynamics would benefit from compression (usually drums, vocals, and other tracks will need some compression to sound more balanced). Mix bus processing often sweetens those sounds and frequencies that sound good and may benefit from processing the entire track with EQ, subtle compression (to ‘glue’ the sounds together), and other specialty processing such as with the Oxford Inflator or from Soothe 2 (some of my favorites).

Mixing your song properly can make a huge difference in taking your ‘good’ idea and making it sound great. The mixing stage is where you want to do all your aggressive shaping of the sound. If the bottom-end bass is too much, that should be dealt with in the mix. If the track lacks airy vocals or sounds a bit flat, the mix is where you want to manage and resolve these issues.

4.  Space To Breathe

One of the areas where small changes in the mix can make a huge difference in the results is in the balance within your tracks. Most songs have 9-17 dB of variance between the softest and loudest sounds within the song. When you want a part to stand out, most people go for additional volume for those tracks. A better approach often is to reduce the rest of the sounds and by default, the sounds you want to be more prominent will stand out.

This one is a little counter intuitive. If you back down the overall sounds within the song, this creates what I call ‘space’ for the song to breathe. My friend Richard Myles has a knack for this technique, and he taught me how to do this effectively. Often, the song would benefit from most of the sounds being brought down a bit in volume. This can provide ‘depth’ in a song. When I listen to any song, I hear the top-to-bottom sound. I also hear the stereo image left-to-right. Richard taught me to hear the ‘depth’ or front-to-back or near-to-far image within the song. It’s surprisingly effective and often is a differentiator in how professional your final result will sound.

The mix is done when you are satisfied with the stereo ‘bounce’ of the song.

5.  Quality Mastering

When your mix is done, don’t fall in love with it. Don’t get me wrong. I know that may be the version you listen to a thousand times, but you need to know that the journey is not quite done at the mix. Your song needs to be mastered (almost always) to really sound great and to achieve that ultimate polished, loud, and radio-quality sound. Mastering is sometimes misunderstood. It is an art and a science all unto itself.

During the mastering stage a Mastering Engineer will further process your stereo mix and will make subtle moves with EQ, add a subtle ‘gluey’ compression, and can make surgical corrections if there were a pop or other noises revealed. These really should be managed in the mix but often they are not. If there are issues with the stereo image or the loudness of the song, mastering will correct any of the sound that needs to be reduced, sweeten the sounds that deserve to be brought out, and add that radio-level polish with the overall sound and in the track’s overall volume.

A well-mastered track provides a sweet listening experience on most platforms, and at low or high volumes. It will provide you with a version of your song that is ready to distribute to the world, will not distort, and it will sound fantastic! Mastering makes all the difference.

Turning Back Time

If I could go back in time and re-engineer those recording sessions I mentioned earlier, I would have advised my younger self to first take a little more time confirming the arrangements of the songs. Then I would have probably recorded my guitars with more mids and less top and bottom-end, because the way the tracks are recorded really matters.

The mix was done with haste because we were paying by the hour, so we had to work fast. I would have used the time differently by working on the raw mix because when your song sounds balanced and clear raw, it will sound the best when processed and fully mixed.

I would have turned a few tracks down a provided more space or depth for the song to ’breathe,’ and I would, without reservation, have the tracks mastered by a professional. Hire the best you can afford. You won’t ever regret it.

I trust you will follow these suggestions and years from now, you’ll listen to your songs feeling proud of your hard work and beautiful sounding successes!

Contact Arthur at arthur@arthurpapanastasiou.com