Hi Eddie,

I haven't time to do a big post, my long working day starts very soon, but read what Rharv said. You have to leave room to add effects and processing.

From my learning as it progresses, you get your gain from using compression etc. It all adds up as gain.

Your thinking is ok I guess if you just want to balance (I'm using this instead of "mix") the raw recorded tracks, but if you want to "mix" which entails so much more than just getting the balance between the tracks nice, you have to leave room for your processing.

Remember, you are where I was a couple of years ago. My humble suggestion is to start learning about compression and all the other processing that can be done in the mixing stages.

All the best, go to go now!

yjoh

[i]Music...a joy for life.