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You'll reap the rewards if you pay close attention to your vocals.

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The devil, as they say, is in the detail, and this old idiom certainly rings true in the world of music production.

A rough idea can quickly become a stack of recorded parts, which can then be arranged into a song, but if you want that song to sound truly professional, you'll need to pay attention to its finer points.

These can be many and varied, of course, but if your mixes aren't quite cutting the mustard and you're struggling to work out how you can improve them, may we suggest the following…

1. Listen

It's the oldest tip in the book, but no less real or important because of it: always keep listening. Very few of us produce music bearing absolutely no relation to an established genre, so listen to tracks that share stylistic traits with your own and learn from them. What's the balance between the drum samples, or the length of feedback on that delayed lead sound? While there are no hard and fast rules about mixing, if your mix balances its elements in a way that seems wildly different to other tracks, you risk losing listeners.

2. Automate your vocals

No amount of compression at the tracking and mixing stages will perfectly balance a vocal – you'll need plenty of automated volume rides, too. Approach this on a word by word, phrase by phrase basis to make sure that each syllable is loud enough, without sticking out too much.

3. Spin your delay

Another vocal favourite is the delay spin, whereby an echo is set up on an auxiliary with the feed to that bus automated. By doing this, individual words can be sent to the delay, but be careful to make sure the results sound natural. Watch for two things: the level of the delays and the amount of feedback.

4. Think about effects chains

When you first start producing music, the temptation is to whack effects onto instruments or tracks in any old order, but it doesn't take long to realise that different chains of plug-ins result in different sounds. It's easy to add a reverb to your track, then decide that you need to compress the sound… but do you really want the compressor after the reverb?

5. Perfect your panning

This is a tip for those who regularly work on headphones. Be bolder with your pan placements! Because headphones don't 'bleed' a left-hand signal into the right ear like speakers do, even subtle pan moves seem huge on headphones. However, check your mixes back on speakers and those small pan changes won't even be noticed. Spread those sounds out!

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