[Juergen]

Hey Steve,

I normally start out eq'ing and compressing the kick and the bass a bit, then work my way around the snare, route the toms to a stereo aux channel (like Jorge does), and then route the OH to a stereo aux channel, eq and perhaps compress a bit (saves CPU).

To make drums sound a bit bigger, I create a stereo submix of the drums (minues the kick) and compress the snot out of it. Then, I mix it in with the other drums, but don't overdo it, otherwise you'll have big sound that is really really really compressed. Sometimes it's a cool effect, though. You might want to play around with the levels of each of the drums which you send to the submix aux channel.

If you use a "big" plugin for your drum submix, like channelstrip, or something made by Waves, you will get plugin latency, that will make the drums sound phasey. To avoid that, create another stereo aux channel and put the same plugin on it (bypass it), and route your original drum tracks through it.

If you feel like the plugin latency is making the drums to be too behind on the beat, you need to find out how much latency there is (# of samples, command-click the volume indicator twice) and nudge the drum tracks for that amount.

I know that sounds almost like hairsplitting, but I have neglected doing it for a while until I realized that it sounded A LOT better when I nudged the drums so that when they go through a plugin with a lot of latency, they still sound aligned, like they were played to begin with.

Mh, this is getting to be a bit long. One more practical thing though: Once you have put a bunch of plugs on your drums and bass, and you are getting to putting plugs on your guitar tracks, and on your voice, you might have run out of CPU power to put a Reverb on. I have found that it is a good thing to use AS plugs and apply the settings to the tracks which you think sound good. That might save you from tinkering with settings that were already good, and it will give you CPU back to use one or two Reverbs...

Juergen