Jeremy Barnes
New member
I've been working on a mix and I know a lot of people in my genre (metal) process the crap out of their mix. Eq, compress, eq again on the individual guitar tracks and then do that all over again on a group bus. I even seen one guy that sent his group bus to another group bus and basically double processed everything. My thing is that when I do that I end up with a really lifeless and stale sounding mix. So my question is this. When I mix a song I'm mixing it towards the final goal and the mix will have a lot of energy. Should I in fact be mixing towards just getting the cleanest and smoothest possible mix and then bring the energy and life back into it in the mastering stage?