This thread kinda follows on from 2 previous posts of mine, one on improving mixdowns and one on getting tracks played on radio. I recently got one of my "demos" played on a local BBC station, and tbh it sounded quite shit. I had expected it to sound a little rough since I basically rushed it just to upload (tbh I didn't even think it would get played) in total I probably spent 4 hours making and mixing the track then I ran it through a mastering chain to make it as loud as possible
(the track is here in case you wanna listen http://soundcloud.com/spectrafunk/dawn-spect-al-demo). This loudness didn't translate across to the radio... anyways this led me to the obvious conclusion that I need to actually do a proper mixdown and decent attempt at mastering before I go about trying to get anything more played or before sending any tracks to labels etc, and also to I need to recheck how my tracks sound in mono since on the radio my track seemed to lose basically all it's stereo image or clarity, idk why.So I spent a lot of today trying to mix and master a track I recently uploaded to my soundcloud (http://soundcloud.com/spectrafunk/freedom-spectral-wip), I had posted this in the WIP thread and people seemed to think it was good, loud and things were punchy. But I cooked that up in just over 2 hours so there was no way of kidding myself that the mix was in any way perfect, obviously a lot needed doing to it. Specifically if you start to turn that track up louder and louder it starts to fall to pieces, a lot of stuff starts to screech out at you and is probably clipping - namely the vocals, the cymbals and white noisey stuff.
Basically the first thing I did was to actually try and finish the track and sort all the levels, after like 3/4 hours of adding things and tweaking the levels it started to sound okay. So then I bounced it out and ran it through a pretty similar chain of plugins to the WIP version I posted above - namely an EQ (just to filter at 20Hz/18kHz), Comp, iZotope for Harmonic Exciter and Stereo Width and a Limiter (might sound a bit OTT but bear with me). The track sounded a little harsh in places again so I ended up removing the harmonic exciter - it seemed to be making stuff like my crashes and vocals really really harsh, especially when the track ran through the limiter.
So I bounced that version out as a "mastered" copy and gave it a listen through, it sounded good but lacked the raw punch that I felt the version above had (which was badly mixed and rushed "mastering"). So I decided to up the volume to see if I got any of the distortion I had before, turns out it sounded pretty clean at higher volumes but still seemed to be lacking something even though it was blasting through my headphones. In total I've only spent like 6/7 hours messing with the track and obviously I could spend another 6 hours remixing and remixing until it was spot on but I thought I'd come here and post this in the meantime.
Ultimately my question is this, how much do you think you should compromise track quality/clarity for punch/loudness, if you physically can't improve the mix because you simply don't know how. The obvious answer is there shouldn't be a compromise, in the ideal world my mixes would be flawless and if they were my tracks would be clear, punchy and loud as many pro tracks are. But atm I just can't reach that stage of clarity and loudness in the end product.
Wow long post lol... yeah
in all honesty I scrap 90% of my dubstep "drops" because they simply don't resonate with me, the arrangements almost never fully express the energy i have for the track and it gets VERY discouraging but you gotta keep at it bro, majority of your favorite artists have had professional help or years upon years of experience that had more trial and error than successful tunes, of course my first year producing, the mixdown was just complete ass, but the content had the potential, but as myself have learned more about the importance of mixdown, my creativity in hard electronic music turned to shit but thankfully, my melody writtens have always improved with me 
so overall, keep at it, try make a song a day! doesnt have to be the next big hit, just a simple song but where youll need to put in the work on the mixdowns, layering, fx, dont worry so much about music content when doing this exercise just make it easy as ass with tons of different sounds and layering! Im sure itll help big time
