AT
Probably your best, ie. cheapest means to get a great collections of sounds is to upgrade SONAR.  SPAT has great drums, effects and Dim Pro and Rapture, among other "Professional" synths.  Cake does deals on and off.  That is a great and reasonable way to upgrade your sound.  NI also does good deals - mid-summer and Christmas.  If you can wait you can find a lot of their stuff at half price.  Both are good choices.

No offence intended, but I couldn't disagree more with this.
I'd rather mix on a tascam 4 track cassette machine from the 80s with good monitors in a good room than on a brand new Rupert Neve desk with bad monitors in a bad room. I'm not exaggerating.

Leee
Sorry, I couldn't get passed "proffesional".... an amusing irony.
Fortunately, others gave some very PROFESSIONAL advice and tips.
 
 
 
------- Lee Shapiro
         Musician, Songwriter, Spelling Enforcement Officer

And I, past "passed". So ironic it looped back around to non-irony.
 
Regards,
Dan

Pragi

SoundRegion
I'm using Sonar Artist and I'm trying to get a decent end result with my music. When I mix the music in headphones it sounds OK, but when I play the music on the big stereo it does not sound very proffesional. Muttled audio, samples, especially drums sounds bad. Even synths. I'm using primarily samples that comes with the product, like SI instruments and I can accept that there might be better alternatives out there, but I have tried a lot of different synths and just can't understand why synth music from the 80's still sound better better than mine. Also do my type of sound card have any influence on the finished product other than maybe S/n ? I use an Akai EIE pro. I was thinking about the Native Komplete 10 bundle. Will that make a big difference in my sound over the standard Cakewalk sounds ? I have tried a lot of the synths and not that impressed, but maybe the samples are worth getting ?

Imo it´s very demanding to create good sound and mixes.
That alone is an art which needs years of experience and diligance.
To do that by headphones is even more difficult, specially if there is not much
expierence in creating good mixes aso with monitors.
 
I had hundreds of mixes which sounded great via headphones 
and collapsed  by hearing via studio monitors.

Yup. for one thing the bass is too loud when I go to regular speakers and the vocal sounds muttled.

If I were you, I would go for active monitors. You will have to figure out what price is reasonable for you. I do not know where you live, but secondhand monitors can be had for (depends on personal economy and taste) less than you might think. These are new prices http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/21-of-the-best-affordable-monitor-speakers-570959
And you can spend as much (if not more) as you want. These are at the expensive end http://www.me-geithain.de/index.php/en/studio/products/active-loudspeaker/rl-801k and sound as good as they look (in a proper room)
If you still make music after 30 years, you will never stop
All the best.

every once in a while guitar center throws a bone/ a sale on active monitors.
got a pair of KRK Rocket 5's (the gold one/special edition) for 100 bucks a piece. for my kid.
essentially 2 bills for a pair of brand new KRK's. not a bad deal.
 

tonyzub999
Just one other thought.  Maybe from a little different perspective. Songs themselves have to be great. The performers have to be great in order to create a great song.   I don't think I have ever heard of a song being great because is was recorded with pristine audio.   

Well...I do remember the 60' and 70's, when the industry developed really fast. Time after time new levels of sound quality, both recording and reproduction (with home equipment) were achieved. IMO many records were praised and lifted to podiums because they were technically so astounding and pioneering, that people didn't care to criticize the musical content.
That hasn't been the case for some 30 years anymore, of course.

Bristol_Jonesey

SoundRegion

Zargg71
Hi. The tings included in SONAR should be more than enough to get you good results using only stock plugins. I will also advise that (if budget allows) you get a pair of monitors to supplement your headphones. Maybe buy secondhand?

Maybe a pair of Bose 301's could be cool ? Right now I'm at a point, after 30 years of very sporadic music making, where I have to decide whether of now to continue and invest more or chuck it all and forget about music. I should certainly make that decision before buying speakers (I will need an amp ,too)

Er, no. They would be a complete waste of money. And you'd need an amplifier to drive them.
Their frequency response will be skewed & hyped to sound good in your average living room.
You don't want that - you want something that tells you the truth about your mixes.
 
Search online for active studio monitors, set yourself a budget to narrow your search down.
 

Interesting. Even though I am trained in the trade of selling HI-FI equipent, I did not know there was a whole line of speakers specifically for this purpose. I can see that it might be the way to go. Since I worked closely with Harman for a number of years, I might try the JBL 305.

I have been trying to switch from ASIO to MME, so I can mix using the build in soundcard and my JBL encounters. It allready made a huge difference. For one thing the drumkit I had chosen for a particular track sounded good in my headphones, but not on the speakers and changing mad a big difference. I guess I just figured that if I bought the AGK "studio" headphones, that would be the way to go.
I've also leaned a lot for checking out tutorials.

MME is the old (very old) Microsoft standard for game cards.  Latency will most likely be horrible if you record or edit. 
 
If your drums sound better through a $5 game card into speakers rather than headphones it is likely you have a problem in the mix stage.  The point of mixing is to have a file that transfers between systems and sounds good on all of them.  Unless you are going to buy your exact system for anyone who wants to listen to your music way you intended it.
 
Hang in there - there is a lot to learn about basics.

AT
MME is the old (very old) Microsoft standard for game cards.  Latency will most likely be horrible if you record or edit. 
 
If your drums sound better through a $5 game card into speakers rather than headphones it is likely you have a problem in the mix stage.  The point of mixing is to have a file that transfers between systems and sounds good on all of them.  Unless you are going to buy your exact system for anyone who wants to listen to your music way you intended it.
 
Hang in there - there is a lot to learn about basics.

I know this. I was just testing this with playback only and it works ok for this. I also setup an Airplay connection to my speakers in the living room and it IS already better. Not perfect, but I'm on the right track.

One more thing that I figured would be mentioned by now (or maybe I missed it) is if you are stuck using headphones most of the time (like I am) and/or cannot afford proper monitors just yet you may want to look into a device by Focusrite called the "VRM Box".
 
It's basically a little device with bundled software that emulates different monitors, soundsystems and environments through your headphones. There is a "Pro" studio environment with common pro monitor emulations, a "Living Room" environment with different stereo system emus and a flatscreen TV emu. And there's a "Bedroom" environment with some of the smaller pro and consumer emus as well as computer speakers and whatnot.
 
It's not perfect of course and doesn't replace a properly treated room and/or proper monitors but it does provide a bunch of alternative and reasonably accurate sound sources and common listening environments. I've have been getting much better mix results since I started using it to comb through all the settings and finding bad spots in miy mixes. I combine that with my pure headphone sound, my monitors (which are good but in a bad room and I can't crank them) and all the other sound sources I have like a bunch of consumer headphones, two stereo systems and whatnot.
 
Bonus is that it acts as an audio interface too if you need it to. No inputs and just the stereo headphone out but it's perfect for just writing MIDI, editing or mixing through. It's super small and uses USB for power and audio when it's being used as the main interface so it's portable.
 
It's also got a big, slick and smooth volume knob on it so it can be used as a "Big Knob" for volume if nothing else (you can hook it up as a kind of a slave to your main interface via SPDIF... in fact that's how I use it). A good studio volume control costs almost or as much as one of these things (about $100).
 
Anyway, I don't work for Focusrite. Just very happy I bought this thing. It's been immensely useful and sounds like it could be just what you need while you sort out all the other suggestions made here.
 
Cheers and good luck.

Listening to the tracks and also LOOKING at the wave forms I think your suffering from not so much the recording part, but mixing and mastering. Your songs are a little out of balance and the overall level is weak. 
LOOK at a commercial recording of that style of music and you will see the waveform is a solid brickwall. There's no room for dynamics in pop music. ( and even country now) Slam that puppy with your mastering tools and get your average RMS level around -12db. My guess is your 10db away from that goal. 
 
Oh, and on the topic of vintage synths, I was making a track for Mony Mony and wanted a Jump kinda sound I must have spent way to long looking. I had to preview most all the soft synths that looked possible.  I was shocked at how bad a lot of the included stuff was, what is all that for??  Anyhow I finally found it in Roland Groove synth. Synth Stack. And even funnier was a great patch in  Good old TTS-1! Just crank the chorus up. 
Which brings up another point, if you want good synth sounds, you need to go beyond the pre sets and start editing. It's always been that way. 

Hey, garbage in: garbage out. You didn't even spell your thread title correctly so it's worth pointing out good music is made by people who sweat the details...on every kind of setup imaginable. Keep trying!