Just dropped my second ep. It comes in under 10 mins and has production from myself and Curtains (who was on Trippie Redds album)

Give it a listen and give me some constructive feedback as I want to try improve.
Track 1 is self produced and I mixed and mastered it all myself

distrokid.com/hyperfollow/kerdo/party-time

Guess it's trash

S*** cool man. I def hear the trippie influence in the production. I thought that when I listened before I even read that in your post. Only thing I would say is you need better mixes for sure. Keep at it my boy.

Nah, don't get down on yourself.

I have it on my docket to listen to.

What kind of feedback are you looking for if anything in particular?

Just constructive feedback. I want to get better so having any feedback helps

How could I improve my mixes?

By paying a professional like myself to do them

I’m interested in hearing what you sound like without the Autotune.

Are your vocals multitracked or solo?

In my opinion (and I may be wrong cuz my airpods are filled with dust) your vocals sound very dry besides the autotune effect. Did you use any reverb on your vocals to spread it out?

Yeah I ran it through Valhalla vintage verb through another bus and used stereo imager as well to make sure it was wide. I have other songs without autotune such as my song Ridah from my first ep if you wanna hear me without the autotune

Rather do it myself yo

I like the vocals on Ridah better, they sound more clean.

Ask yourself this: do you really need Autotune?

i also noticed Space X & Ridah have no kick drum

I just like the sound of Autotune, I've always been a fan of it since the tpain days, I probably don't need it (or as much as on here) but I liked the sound. Ridah does have a kick drum I just layered it with the 808, space X doesn't have one although I didn't produce it

Fair enough. Well if you insist on doing it yourself, the only way to improve your mixes is to actually become a proficient mixing engineer. That takes time. Years, even for those who are already gifted in other areas of music.

It sounds like you have some of the basic concepts of mixing down which is great for demos, but if you intend for the music to compete in the marketplace among the artists you admire, you’ll have to educate yourself even further. Much further. Again, unless you are some sort of savant it’ll likely take years from where you are today. People literally go to college to learn this stuff lol (myself included)

That’s why it makes much more sense to hire someone who’s done all that already. People like myself have already invested the time and money into all that so artist like yourself can just focus on the creative process and invest your time in money in other areas. Ask yourself this, would a CEO throwing a banquet party try to cook the food himself instead of hiring a professional chef? Would he Taylor his own suit or cut his own hair? DIY culture is cool when it comes to some things but other things just make more sense to outsource to a specialist. Everyone has a role to play and the best music usually comes from teams of people. Not trying to discourage you, just giving you some insight.

But yeah if you wanna do it yourself, right on. You just have to commit to the journey. It can’t just be an afterthought if you really want to sound great. There’s not really a magic pill anyone can give you that will improve your sound overnight. I recommend starting with YouTube tutorials (which I’m sure you already have) Only trouble with YouTube is that the people who post content are at varying degrees of proficiency so you never really know if what you’re learning is applicable in the real world.

You can also check out Linda.com and puremix.net. There are tons of master classes on mixing too. Nothing beats school tho honestly. Some colleges offer online courses. Best of luck

I always throw this around even though I’ve never used it but Landr.com? does mixing for you. And you can always check out fiverr.com to find an engineer

Bro landr doesn’t do mixes for you 🤦🏽‍♂️

Please don’t tell that lie lol. It uses AI to do MASTERING but you still have to start with a good mix to get a good result from it. I used it before in the past and it’s serviceable for a poor man’s master but I don’t think it comes anywhere close to sounding like what a professional mastering engineer would do. I prefer the Mastering Assistant AI built into Izotope’s Ozone 9 software. It typically gives you a good starting point and then you can tweak the parameters to taste (provided you know what you are doing)

Lmao thats why I put the disclaimer in there first, now I know not to use or recommend it ever again.

I gotta check that Ozone feature out, it’s probably what alot of guys are using on Fiverr.

Bro this is awesome advice and a fantastic write up, thanks so much.

I used Ozone for the mastering of this ep, I used the assistant then tweaked it to how I wanted it to sound. Definitely what the "non professional" engineers use on fiver. I paid someone on fiver to mix and master my first song but in the end it sounded very bland and just a bit clearer so I brought the plugins such as Ozone, Nectar, Neutron, Fabfilter pro q, Autotune and some waves plugins and just decided to learn to do it myself. I feel I did as good of a job

It’s good your willing to learn, whenever I get anything done on fiverr I always ask them for a sample of my work or what I want done before I commit, It doesn’t matter how many songs they have on their page because that can always be faked

Yeah fair enough. I asked for a demo of the work and it sounded clean at the time but now i realise it kind of was just bland but cleaned up