Quote Originally Posted by davethedrummer
one thing though
i read an article with a famous breaks and house producer (sorry lost th name) and he made a lot of sense
he started saying that he used to use a lot of eq
but now he spends more time getting the source sounds right and really trying not to use too much eq on the channels
it makes a lot of sense, there's the old saying "if you try to fix sh*t with effects, you'll only get effected sh*t". same goes for the eq usually. of course if the source sound is as good as possible you don't have to use force on the channel when mixing. i usually get worried if i have everything ready for mixing and i notice some channel that would _clearly_ need effects to sit better in the mix - i think that you should already have an acceptable mix in the arrangement stage, and when you record everything into a mixdown version and start the mixing, the mix should be done because you know it will make the whole track sound so much better.

and the next step, mastering, i try to leave to the professionals. once again, i make the mix the best i can so i'm not demanding anything more when i hear it. but a professional mastering engineer with his equipment can give that last touch to it.

as for the mixdown, i record everything to audio tracks, everything separately (a mixdown version would contain 8-14 audio tracks): kicks, snares, hihats, percussions, bass, instruments, vocals, everything. hi-pass or low-shelf filter on every track, then noise gate, possibly a little overdrive (snares, sometimes bass and kick), individual compression, perhaps individual reverb or delay, then route into a bus channel.
kick+bass - bus 1, snare + other drums - bus 2, usually a generic reverb stands on bus 3. i compress kick and bass together, usually use a side-chain compression on other drums-bus so that i trigger the compression by the kick channel (heavy kick eats just a little bit 0.5dB-1dB out of hihats, snare etc).
every channel in mono, possibly panned a little bit. except for strings, chords and what ever the instrument structure is in the track, which are in stereo - i mean the "second most important instrument" which usually is somekind of a chord. the most important instrument usually in mono and dead center, so its easy to listen to.