Hello, again, "guitarhacker"...

I hope you (and the rest of the respondents) will forgive the delay in responding to you. I work two jobs that consume a great of time: managing rental properties (which is an on-call, 24/7 type of gig), and as a volunteer stage manager at a local ballet school.

Any old way, I'm going to follow-up with you on the things you mentioned that I have some kind of experience with and readily understand

First of all, thanks for explaining what "cans" are.

Next, your statement: "When you compress and normalize, you are raising ALL the things in the track including the noise at the very bottom. So while you get a stronger track, you might now have noise issues.... mic hiss, and other things that you don't want at audible levels."

That's very useful information! I suspect I've damaged many audio tracks in the past by using that function.

Next, "More than once, I have found the interaction of events in 2 tracks combined to cause what sounded like a glitch. The solution is simple.... simply use the volume envelope to pull one of those tracks down briefly to get past that glitch point."

Okay, that's pretty straightforward. Got it.

Up next: "Next is to get the volume in the mix set appropriately for the genre."

I suppose that within that suggestion you are including vocals as part of "the mix." I've never been present at a recording session, never been in a recording studio, even. In the song I posted the vocal was recorded by the singer. 99% percent of the time when I "mix" a song it has only virtual instrument tracks.

Nonetheless, your advice concerning genre considerations is sensible. If I think about what I've heard when listening to various kinds of music, I believe I could say that I've noticed in casual way the placement of vocals. Some seem closer, others less so; some are louder, others softer, dryer or wetter, and so on.

Finally, "Levels and reverb are the largest factors in getting tracks to set properly."

Hah! Those two functions are probably the only ones I've used with any frequency throughout my entire experience of composing and mixing songs.

Because of my stone-cold ignorance of some terms you use, such as "gate," "master buss," "normalize," "band," and more, I realized that I'd be wasting your time discussing them with you. So, over the weekend I went out to a used bookstore and picked up a copy of The Billboard Illustrated Home Recording Handbook. Paging through the index at the back of the book I saw entries for most of the above-mentioned terms. It's got a bunch of pictures in it relative to the concept(s) explored in each chapter, so it should be helpful.

"guitarhacker," I'm gonna rate you high as a teacher as well as a performing musician! Thank you, again, for your obvious committment to these forums.

Sincerely,

LOREN (a.k.a. "bluage")

"Music is what feelings sound like."-- borrowed from a Cakewalk Music Creator forum member, "Mamabear".