-turn all the faders down, bring the master fader to zero and turn off all the master bus plugins, except maybe spectrum analyzer and "safe limiter" (For example the free Waves L1 clone, W1, with threshold at 0dBFS, doing nothing, just making sure that the finished mix doesn't clip. Don't worry about archieving the loudness at this part, it will be done in the mastering, not mixing).
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- bring up the bass first and keep that as a benchmark. Have it fucking slammed against the compressor and put it so that the peaks hit at -18dBFS and never move it again. If the bass gets buried, don't turn it up, but turn everything else down. If the bass sounds too quiet at -18dBFS, turn your monitors louder.
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- Add the vocals so that they cut thru the bass but don't overpower them. if the song is an instrumental so far, skip this phase
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- The bring up the kick and listen to the low end that it isn't competing with the bass in the sub or killing eachothers out. If they are, do something about it. My suggestion is to sidechain kick to the bass (see the sticky)
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- Then add the overheads so that you get nice balance with the kick and the cymbals, don't worry so much about the snare
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- Then add the guitars. They have to cut thru the mix, but not overpower anything else. If they cut thru the mix only by overpowering something, do something about the guitar sound.
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- Then add the snare. Make sure that it cuts thru but doesn't overpower the mix. If it doesn't cut thru the mix without hitting the limiter, do something about it. Usually the bottom mic helps alot.
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- Then add everything else to taste
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- After you have done this, I suggest you group everything (ie. kick, snare, drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals, fx... etc.) so its easier to do small adjustments. Its not mandatory, but I highly recommend it.
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- Go take a break, atleast 10 minutes. Eat something, catch some fresh industrial polluted air, have a smoke, go watch some tv, surf the net. Come back and listen again. Tweak until it sounds good. 20-60 minutes of tweaking, a 10 minute break, 20-60 minutes of tweaking, a 10 minutes break, *continue until satisfied*
