Why Your Mix Still Doesn’t Sound Professional (Even After Mastering)

5 Reasons Your Song Still Sounds Amateur — Even After Mixing & Mastering

Hamilton & Toronto Mixing Engineer – Morph Productions

If you’ve been mixing your own tracks and they still don’t sound clean, wide, or “finished,” you’re not alone. Most artists I work with know the basics, EQ, compression, a limiter on the master bus but the results still fall short of the pro sound they hear on Spotify.

The truth? It’s rarely one big mistake. It’s usually a handful of small oversights that stack up and hold your mix back. Here are the issues I see most often when artists come to me for mixing and mastering and how to fix them.

1. The Low-End Is Fighting Itself

You can know everything about EQ, but if the low-end foundation isn’t right, the whole mix collapses.

Most common issues I see:

• Kick and bass occupying the same frequency range
• Sub-heavy bass that disappears on small speakers
• No high-pass filtering on non-bass instruments
• Room modes lying to you (especially in untreated rooms)

Fix:
Commit to either a kick-driven or bass-driven low end and give each its own space. High-pass more tracks than you think you need to. If you’re using synths or drum machines, make sure the sounds complement each other. Audition them together when choosing; you’ll be surprised which one ends up working best. If you’re using real instruments, the right kick trigger can really help with the overall sound.

2. Your Room Is Lying to You

Even talented engineers can’t overcome the physics of an untreated room.

If your space is exaggerating 120 Hz, you’ll cut too much of it. If it hides 60 Hz, you’ll boost too much.

This is why your mix sounds different in:

• Your car
• AirPods
• Laptop speakers
• Your friend’s studio

Fix:
Treat the room if you can. If not, at least reference constantly and use something like Sonarworks SoundID to keep things honest. Make sure to use a lot of different reference sources to help balance out the inaccuracies of each listening space.

3. You’re Using Too Many Plugins

This is super common.

When a mix doesn’t feel right, the instinct is to keep adding more plugins. But more processing doesn’t equal a better mix.

Most often, things get worse because:

• You’re “fixing” problems you created earlier in the chain
• Saturation stacks up across multiple tracks
• Compression slowly steals the punch
• Transients disappear and everything feels flat

Fix:
One of the main things I do when I get a Logic Pro session to work on is remove plugins that are harming the sounds. You’ll be surprised how often the mix instantly breathes again. Keep in mind most modern synth and drum machine plugins were designed to sound amazing as they are. Any tools you’re going to use should only be used to make them fit in the overall mix, not to make them sound “better” in solo.

4. Your Gain Staging Is Hurting You

Clipping, overly hot tracks, or plugins being fed too much signal are sneaky mix killers.

Common signs:

• Harsh high end
• Smeared transients
• Overly dense mids
• Compressors choking instead of controlling
• Missing low-end

Fix:
Aim for around -18 to -12 dBFS per track. Your mix bus should still have plenty of headroom before mastering. Try clip-gaining down rendered audio loops and turning down the master volume of all your synth and drum machine plugins. If you hit any processing plugins too hard it can really affect the sound negatively.

Try an experiment to prove this: run a kick drum hot into an EQ plugin and then clip-gain it down by 10 dB. You’ll probably notice you get a lot more low-end and roundness from the sound.

5. The Performance or Arrangement Needs Tweaking

This is the big one nobody talks about.

Sometimes the mix isn’t the problem.

It’s that:

• The vocal needs tighter doubles
• The chorus needs thicker harmonies
• The bass part is muddy by nature or doesn’t fit the track
• The guitars are fighting the vocal

A mix can’t fix an arrangement issue.

Fix:
Be honest with the production before blaming the mix. Sometimes a small performance fix solves a huge mix problem. Make sure that every part in the song is actually necessary. People tend to add too much to their productions, especially if they’ve been working on the song for a long time and get bored of what was there originally.

When You’re Ready for a Professional Mix or Master

If you’re close but can’t quite get the clarity, width or punch you want, that’s exactly what I help artists with.

From my Hamilton and Toronto mixing studios, I’ve mixed everything from indie releases to EDM tracks with over 75 million streams, plus commercial audio for brands and publishers.

If you want a clean, balanced, professional-sounding track without the frustration you can reach me anytime at:

📧 ashton@morphproductions.com
📍 Hamilton & Toronto • Online Mixing Available Worldwide
🎧 Mixing & Mastering • Production