Quote Originally Posted by Mass Effekt View Post
A lot of people make the mistake of when EQing the bass kick always go right ahead and turn turn up the bass frequencies. If you don't have not too great of sounds, this with actually make it sound worse, and more musty. Using a compressor to a certain extent is much better.

I acutally have a question too, when mixing drums, which parts of the drums should have stereo seperation and which parts shouldn't? Should only the snares have mono seperation and the kicks have stereo, something I've noticed when listening to records is that certain instruments in the drums have different seperations.
Not sure what you mean by "musty", some might call that dirty, gritty, raw, vintage...depending on what you are thinking of as musty. But you probably mean muffled and yeah that is not good. I think layering kicks and all drum sounds in general is huge, if you are just EQing a single copy of a kick drum track you can't do as much as if you EQ or filter a few diff ways then blend them, or layer another kick with it to create a diff character in the sound. layering creates thickness without necessarily having to dramatically turn up certain frequencies

as far as your 2nd part, really all sounds in a mix should be separated to some degree. if everything were center panned, it would be a muddled mess. think of a mix as a horizontal line from 100% left to 100% right, you want each sound to have its own place along that horizontal line, some sounds like kicks and snares stay closer to the center usually but youll notice the melody elements, hats, and backup vocals in most songs have significant panning, the lead vocal should go right in the center, so consider that when mixing, you need to leave room