This is now part of the gospel according to nwj:
I've got all my mixer channels ultimately running into two busses, the drum buss and the music buss. Music is for sustainy sounds, and drum is for any percussive sounds. I find at the end of the project, when I start doing dat ghetto mastering, I'm essentially balancing the punch/peakiness of the drums against the body of the music. Just having access to those two busses (Okay, sometimes a sub channel if it is, like, seriously about sub) to balance the two elements, make small little moves. +1db to this -.5 there. The point is to balance it in the context of the mastering chain. If you have really peaky drums, they'll be getting a lot of the limiter, that will change their punch, and change their relation to the body of the mix. Just two faders, and all internal balances within each buss are maintained.
Also, as you do this often enough, as you build your mixes, and stay real with it the whole time, you'll just know how high your drums are peaking, how thick your body is, and how much the master limiter is going to crush those drums.
Def a mixdown question.
Re loss of headroom w/ hp - big time dudes. Can eat 3 db easily. That is fucking huge. Check different modes of your eq, and their relationship to phase. The upside there is that you can gain headroom by keeping the balls in a sound by not neutering it with a high pass.
Also consider that frequency plays a large roll in the perception of volume. Sounds are like pyramids, the width is the energy in the sound, the height is frequency. Squeeze that pyramid, narrower base/bass
means more energy up top. More energy up top, louder.
Re sample selection: this old chestnut is kind of dumb, and annoying to hear. "Start with good sounds, then you don't have to do anything with them." Yes, and start with good patches on your synth, start with good midi files, start with good presets on your fx. By the time you are done, it will sound great, and you'll have made none of it! Those good samples that you suggest people start with were MADE by people. If those people made good sounds, so can you. Like, it is in your job description. Of course there are many ways that I'm wrong, but many that I'm right.
So when selecting drum samples, it is a trap to select really phat samples. That means those samples have been limited already. Also probably have high frequency content as well, but defo chopped. Look at your phat drum samples in an editor. If the front part of the waveform looks like a brick, it is limited. While these samples may sound fat, their usefulness is limited (only 30% pun intended). People that are super antilimiting are probably using presquashed samples. If it is already crushed, there is only so much crushing you can do to it.
Now you can work with these kind of samples, but your STRICT gain staging becomes more important, as you won't be pushing your drums into the limiter. The drums have already had their peaks crushed. So all other sounds have to be strictly balanced against the already crushed down elements. This, maybe you can tell with my contorted language, and failure to actually express myself, is because this way is pretty dumb, more difficult, and leaves less room for you to make accurate judgements and corrections to your overall sound.
SO when selecting samples, yes find samples that work for you/move you, but look at them. You really do want the front side to peak pretty good, so that you can LATER crush it to fuck.
AxeD - I hope that degree and your looming job prospects are not getting your head all swole up.
