One of the first steps before you start experimenting with clipping and such is to make space for the drums. Find a good, healthy frequency balance. Make sure the snare attack and body frequencies aren't too masked by other instruments, decide which low frequency range you want reserved for the kick and which for the bass and so on. If you have everything happening everywhere, you're in mud city and nothing sounds punchy or clear.
Example situation:
You crafted a nice drum sound. Your snare has some nice attack at around 5-6kHz, some upper-end snap at 8kHz and some pretty huge body at 200Hz. Your kick has a fat OOMPH at around 80Hz and some nasty, wet click at 8kHz. Shit sounds awesome when you solo the drum groups. However, when you bring up the rest of the instruments, all you hear is the snare's high frequency snap and the kick's clickyness with some uncontrolled bass frequency rumble.
Here's what might've happened:
You have a shit-ton of presence going on in the guitars in the snare's attack area. The bass guitar has lots of 200Hz in there, and the guitar's palm mutes have a nasty peak at the same area. Also, you have boosted the bass at 80Hz to give it that full, round, bassy tone and went overboard with it. It's taking away from the kick's low frequency power and making things a mess down there.
How to approach fixing it:
Decide what you consider the main, important elements for the instruments. You love the snare sound, so you want to keep it that way. Cool. Sweep around with an EQ to find where the key frequencies of the snare are. When you find them, start sculpting some room for them in the other instruments. Try to find a way to cut the guitars a bit around the same regions to make way for the snare. You have to use your ears here. If you feel it ruins the guitar tone, you need to make a different decision. The changes don't have to be drastic. Try to find the right frequency balance where things just kinda snap together, cut through and sound like a whole, full mix. One thing you might want to try (IF you just can't get the right results with EQ) is taming the guitars' 200Hz boom with a multiband comp. It doesn't need to be C4. You can even use a single band compressor with HP/LP sidechaining perfectly fine. All right, what about the kick, then? Consider dividing the low end a bit. You really like the bass tone you have going, so start from there. Try to find a better frequency for the kick's low end power. For an example, you might find a nice balance when focusing the bass on the 70-80Hz area and the kick around the 100-120Hz area, cutting them both to make room for the other.
Now, don't take these as magic numbers or anything.
I pulled them out of thin air, so they might be totally off in your case. Experiment, listen, and learn to make the right decisions. It's a never-ending learning process. But at least it's fun
