Where can I learn how to make my music sound professional?

[TweakHead]

MTBC is right. I've used Logic for many years now. And I bought all the magazines dedicated to it, doesn't hurt to look and see if there's something I've missed to fill the holes. After a couple experiments, you're able to integrate some handy stuff into your work flow. Later you find yourself doing stuff really fast and intuitively. It comes with time and no one should stress it to much, I think.

People usually take a long time to get a rock solid Kick and Bass combo, for example. Usually comparing the material with mastered tracks is a big factor in producing frustration. Takes some time to train the ear. I highly recommend you get the sounds as close to what you want on the synthesizers (or other sources) before applying any sort of post processing to them. That's also where the gold is.

Then it's just a matter of making things play right together: for kick and bass, there's a couple of solutions available. Side-chain compressor on the Bass channel triggered by the Kick (used as input for the compressor) is probably one of the most used tricks for Electronic Music.

Still on the bass chapter, it's easy to go wrong on many stages, some related to synthesis, some to mix and processing. For example: if you want it to be steady and rock solid, you need to take away what's called the "drift" on some synthesizers, in others it's named such things as: "free" [running oscillators], on others you need to select "retrig", on the Virus you'd need to select a Phase value for the oscillators to recycle the wave for each note played. This gives you phase consistency (very much needed on many electronic music genres and easier to handle for mixing the bottom end). Something to look at on the synthesizer before going anywhere else. Also good idea to have an oscilloscope (there's some free ones) and see if the notes have their own space or colliding with each other - while adjusting the amp envelope.

If your patch is using an envelope assigned to the filter's frequency (which many times it does in a lot of music) and you feel your sub energy is lost with that, you can always add another oscillator tuned 12 semitones bellow the first with a triangle or square wave and mix it with the original. Some synthesizers have their own sub oscillator tuned one octave or two bellow. You can layer two bass instruments, one covering the sub part, the other one with a high pass filter leaving room for the first, and covering the mid range area. I'm ranting about this, just as an example of how you can go one route or the other for the same problem - one is solved inside the synthesizer and the other makes use of two instruments and careful mixing technique. In the case of the layer option, you can send both signals to a bus/aux channel and process them together - which will make them sound as one sound. Probably a good idea to shave off some frequencies from the kick in the mids for the bass's snappy tone to come through. You EQ a sound while listening to how if affects the others, in context.

For other sounds, depending on how much the Bass comes into the Mids, it's probably a good idea to use a low cut/high pass filter on those. But it they're programmed right, and played on the right octaves, not much cut is needed. But EQ here is used to reserve space, so as to preserve clarity. On breaks you probably don't need to cut the low end from the Leads, you can even benefit from it... This is an example of how mixing interacts with composition.