I think the most sought after goal of any producer/artist is getting their music to sound like a major label release. Most demos don’t come close to sounding radio ready and super polished partly because of the inexperience of the engineer or person mixing/mastering the music. Also, most artists fail to recognize the importance of professionally mastering their music. You can come close to getting that professional sound at home but takes a lot of time and experience crafting it without the use of really top notch gear. Most commercial radio released music is very carved out, meaning there are a lot of frequencies that have been eq’d out or cut. This allows for the music to be very compressed/limited to be perceived as loud when bumpin on the radio.

Here’s a few tips to make your demo’s sound close to radio ready

1. Use eq correctly.  One of the biggest mistakes is when you have a bad sound and try to fix it with eq. If an instrument sounds a little off, try a different one. When in doubt, look to cut frequencies rather than boost. You can do wonders using low cuts and high cuts on beats, especially snares. Eq acts like a chisel to cut away at bad frequencies that cloud up a mix. When an artist is sculpting something from stone, he cuts away, he doesn’t add stone to make his piece of art. Think of eq the same way. Every instrument has it’s own frequency spectrum it lives in, it’s your job to make sure other instruments don’t take up that same frequency

2. Easy on Compression. Another very misused tool. A compressors job is to squash the dynamic range of a signal. Dynamic range is the lowest to highest level in one particular signal. This helps with instruments that are very bass heavy and tend to eat space in your mix. Always look to go easy on the compression ratio at first and use your ears to judge.

3. Balance your levels. Many people mix, but they don’t really MIX. Mixing is more than just being creative and placing sounds from left to right. You need to achieve a good balance of all tracks in relationship to each other. Vocals should always be the loudest track in the mix, but you should be able to clearly pick out each other track in the mix. Eq really plays a big part here also, if the eq on your tracks are off, your levels will never sit right and you will never have a clear mix.

4. Reverb/Space Dimension to your mix. Most Rap music is very dry, which means there is not much reverb treatment on tracks besides vocals and even so, it’s used minimally. One trick to achieve a radio ready sound is to give your mix medium to large room reverb on the master bus of your mix. Make sure to use a very very small wet/dry ratio. I usually use 5-8% and also make sure to reduce the high frequency content which most reverb plugins have setting for. When used properly and sparingly, this glues your mix together giving it a filled out sound.

5. Mastering. Mastering is the very last step in the recording process. This is usually done by a separate engineer and studio then where the music was tracked. A good mastering job will take your mix to another level. It will make it sound consistent on many different speakers and systems and will give a very well rounded balance to all the tracks start to finish. Mastering is also expensive if done in a professional studio which is why alot of unsigned artists skip this step. One plugin that has really helped in making my music stand out is Ozone by the company Izotope. Ozone includes a parametric eq, multiband compressor, reverb, exciter, and stereo widener. When used properly, Ozone can really make a difference on your tracks. Just Blaze has even used it on some of Jay-Z’s Kingdome Come record. Check out the link: http://www.izotope.com/artists/just_blaze.asp