Advice for a beginner

[TW1306]

I am 16 years old and have been making trance and hard trance for roughly two years, but it seems like I haven't improved much since I started. I can make ok-sounding tracks, but everything I make is missing the proper 'professional' sound, for want of a better phrase.

I have a basic setup: laptop, software (Reason) and headphones (Beyerdynamic DT990), but I feel like lack much of the technical knowledge that's needed. My sound/synth design skills are quite basic and there's a lot I don't know about EQ and mastering. I've already contacted a few people (including an electronic music magazine and even one of the A-Level music teachers at my school) but none of the replies I got were very useful.

Here's what I think is the best track I've done so far
I've also been asked by a couple of people to do music for some projects, here's something I sent to one of them

So my question is, what resources would you recommend for getting better at (or even for learning) sound design, EQ and the like in order to, well, make better-sounding music? And is there any advice in general that would be good to know? I know this is probably quite a broad question, but I'm really unsure of how to go about improving my music.

[rod_zero]

1.- Books, Mixing Audio by Roey Izhaki. Secrets of House Music production (released by sample magic). Secrets of dance music (by attack magazine).

2.- Video courses, for electronic music I would recommend Ask audio over other sites becaus they have more content for that genre. Especially the "10 Don'ts of...." (by Joe Albano) series is very very good, also the "genre" tutorials by Multiplier. On lynda.com there is also a series on eq, compression, reverb and delay which is very good at explaining the effects. Groove3 has very good courses too. I prefer those sites to youtube because here you get full courses, well organized and mostly well produced.