it's undeniable that good reference monitors are a major boon, especially to us rookies (I was truly amazed at the enhanced detail when I bought
my Mackie HR 824's) but with patience and effort even us rookies can usually pull of a superb master.
The two most important things (in order, buy the way) I could recommend are:
1. Regardless if you have expensive studio monitors or even if you have to mix primarilly on headphones, find opportunities to listen to your CD's on as many systems as possible! (walkman, laptop PC, cheap heaphones, good heaphones, car stereo, HiFi stereo, club PA.. whatever you can get your hands on. Heck if you are truly hard-up, but live close to a good music store build a rapor with the manager or staff and you can probably test your mixes on their gear now and then.
2. I put this second mostly because it's abstract, and not as quantifiable as number one (at least not in the terms I know to use to convey it, my apologies.) Thry to think of your mix as living in 3 dimensions. I lost you already, didn't I? Well, try to stay with me here, and I'll go one step at a time (It's ok, even I have trouble understanding this.)
If you picture a "frame" of your song in 3-d, the 3 planes equate to the obvious "left and right" of any stereo recording, the "high and low" which is also a familiar concept to any audiophile, but finally, you also have "front and back" to make the third dimension. We all know that you control left and right with PAN, and that you control high and low with EQ. What is more likely to be a new concept is that front and back can be controlled with REVERB.
So, to put all that mumbo-jumbo together into a semblance of advice, you want to make apropriate use of the entire sonic "space" that you have to play around in. I'm afraid I can't really descibe what I'm getting at any better than that. The "astheics" of this sonic "space" or "palette" would best be described by a bonified musical or audio artis, not the likes of myself.
Bottom line: your tunes have a captivating and enjoyable quality. I bet with the proper mixdown that if you listened to the tracks through headphones or a good sound system that you could fall into an almost immediate meditation. That's why I'd call it "new age". Is there a "secular new age" category?
By the way, what instrument(s) are you using in these recordings?
-Shaz