Quote Originally Posted by Metadog
it's taken me years to approach a decent understanding of compression - tend to use it a lot but fairly mild settings

it's well important in techno

sometimes on individual sounds, sometimes on groups

been getting into putting a limiter on the main output, just tickling it - keep those fills in check, means you can push the overall level up slightly

tend to lightly compress kick & bass individually, then route them to same channel and slightly compress them together

use eq to help define layers, pulling best frequencies outta sounds you've got running, making room in mix by removing other freqs
For some kinds of techno with stacks of dynamics (Detroit techno for example) overcompression will really suck the life out of it, but I kinda like a really overdriven sound on some of the more clubby tracks.