ok ill probably get slaughtered for this but:-
how i do things, is be absolutely brutal with your parts - i generally have my track with a sort of
5-7 band breakdown in my head, and i stick to this with what im mixing.
ie - say a pad , top and airy thats running over the track - like you say, you solo it and its sound
nice and full on its own, but think about the track in context and what you want the this pad part
to say frequency wise in the over all context of the track. So kill off those lower bands , take no
prisoners. Youll probably screw your face up at how much youve taken off and how much it now
sounds not as rich, but when you unsolo the track it will now 'fit' its context to the rest of the
track.
Do this for every piece/part (drums, perc, pads, basses, vocals, and so on)( show contempt to
the frequencys! ) and by the end youll have a pretty solid, 'correct', if somewhat plastically track
to work with. You can then go back to each bit in the mix (not solod) and gentlly add back a
slope of frequencys to the mix for each part to add a richness ( although nothing like as rich and
sonically pleasing as your brain imagines they should be) You should get a pretty good grasp of
this after 2 or 3 tracks, and it will become second nature to let your ego go and start thinking in
context ( your the player in every part here, think about how the drummer always wrongly wants
his drums the loudest, the guitarist always wrongly wants there vocals eq'd brighter etc )
Compression thereafter , i work in a simlar way, only through thinking of fatness, evenness,
loudness, and
percussiveness (envelope). But fundamentally, this eq technique should be the foundation of the
strongest tracks
Alan