Quote Originally Posted by RichieV
How many and how do you arrange your group channels ?

I am also intested what method you compress.
For example do you group lets say all the hihat sounding sounds to one channel and compress that. Then put all the weird sounds onto another yada yada.
every channel begins with a hipass/lo shelfing filter depending (bass and kick usually low shelfing, everything else hipass), then a noise gate. i also use minimal signal path when recording, cut the mixer out and connect external hardware straight to recording. after that, what ever a channel needs: compression, eq, sometimes slight overdrive/distortion for snares etc..

drums:

channel 1: kick --> bus 1
channel 2: bass --> bus 1
channel 3: snare --> bus 2
channel 4: hihats, crashes, rides etc --> bus 2
channel 5: percussions --> output or individual bus..

then "backing instruments", chords, pads etc usually go to --> bus3

melody, "main instruments" --> bus 4

buses:

bus 1: compression and eq, to get the kick and bass sit tight together
bus 2: compression sidechained to kick channel, so kick eats some of the snares and hihats away to give a more rhythmical feeling
bus 3: reverb to move the backing instruments a bit to the background on the "sound stage" and make them sound like recorded in the same space
bus 4: compression, slight reverb

so every channel usually with individual compression, _very_ easy excluding kick and bass which usually require hard settings, and then the bus contains further compression just to glue instruments together

for drums i use aux reverbs, make one bus start with a hipass filter then a good reverb and send hihats, snares and percussions to this bus so the drumset uses the same reverb