The Mixing Engineer's Handbook, 3rd ed

get the bass and drums so they just start to pump to where you can actually hear them breathing in and out with the tempo of the song. What I’ll do is put the drums and bass in a limiter and just crush the hell out of it. Then I’ll play with the release and the attack times until I can actually make that limiter pump in time with the music, so when the drummer hits the snare, it sucks down and you get a good crest on it. When he lets go of the snare, the ambience of the bass and the drums suck and shoot back up again. You can actually hear a [breathing sound] going on that was never there before. It really was there; it’s just that you’re augmenting it by using that limiter.”

The trick to getting the punch out of a compressor is to let the attacks through and play with the release to elongate the sound.

Just remember that it usually sounds best if the EQ is placed before the reverb, not after it, because it has a great effect on the frequency response of the rever

Easy-to-Remember Golden Rules of Equalization

you’re having trouble with the mix because it’s sounding cloudy and muddy on the bottom end, turn off the kick drum and bass to determine what else might be in the way in the low end.

Limit the number of elements. Usually there should not be more than four arrangement elements playing at the same time. Sometimes three elements can work very well, but very rarely will all five elements simultaneously work.

The correct angle is determined strictly by taste, with some mixers preferring the monitors to be angled directly at their mixing position and others preferring the focal point (the point where the sound from the tweeters