sounds perfect 👌

Dude this is SOOOO SICK! How the crap did you ever get the kick/808 to sound like that!?

That aside, I do have a problem with the mastering. I don’t know if you’re intentionally coming down on the dynamic range side of the loudness war, but typically, this sort of stuff isn’t supposed to have quite so much dynamic range, lol. If you’ve already tried researching mastering, then I’d suggest getting a book about mastering. I have a book that I think is called “The Mastering Engineer’s Handbook” by Bobby Owsinski, I think…? I’m probably wrong about the poor guy’s name, lol. Most of the book is somewhat irrelevant to bedroom producing honestly, but it does give really good explanations for how to think about mastering, how to construct good mastering chains, and tangentially, codecs. Tl;dr, don’t use 192kbps mp3s and you should be good. XD

Jokes aside, this track really is super awesome. Hope you’re planning to keep going in 2020!

Happy new year! I agree with Uxvellda about the mixing, which is its own can of worms, but I'd add that there's also some... inconsistencies.

As an example, listen to 00:13-25. The synths you’re using are very clearly in a triplet pattern, but the drums aren’t. If you listen to the hats, you can hear them going “1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &” as opposed to the triplet pattern, “1-&-a 2-&-a 3-&-a 4-&-a”… something like that, anyway. XD

Another example would be at the end of the first buildup, at 00:46-49. The snare is clearly building into a non-triplet pattern, which is fine, but it clashes pretty hard with the triplet synth.

At other times, the harmony clashes more than the rhythm, such as 01:16-29. The vocal loop uses two notes, the root note (also called “do,” “the 1,” or just “the root”), and the flat 2nd. On its own, the vocal loop likely has a cool sort of sound, because alternating between those notes just sounds cool like that. But when used in a song, you have to be conscious of that flat 2nd, because it can clash really hard with a non-flat 2nd (not to mention the root note itself, since it’s only a half step away from that).

If you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about with this music theory stuff, then I strongly suggest looking up some free youtube tutorials. You don’t need to be a master of music theory, but you do need to have some basic knowledge of scales, chords, etc. You needn’t learn anything more complicated than basic chord progressions and cadences (and if you don’t know what those are, don’t worry too much about them).

Anyways, that’s about all I got, as if it’s not a novel, haha.

-Hippokopter