When mixing your tracks, there will be certain things you need to check before you do anything, first you need to make sure there is sound coming from your track otherwise you won’t be able to do much with it. Firstly what I tend to do whilst mixing my track is to start with the main vocals, I usually put some plate reverb onto it because it gives it a nice echo sound, I would also put some EQ onto it because from there I could roll of all of the unwanted low to high end. Next I would move onto the drums, by this I mean just roll off some low end on the snare and for the kick, depending on what style the band are going for I would usually slightly increase the low end and roll off high end so there it is very boomy. Next if it was a full band id usually work on the guitars or piano depending on whatever I feel has more life about it. However if I was working on guitars I would put reverb on them usually space designer and make it sound like they where in a massive arena. When it comes to effects on the pain there is so many different things you could do, I would personally go for some small reverb, usually a medium sized hall. Then I would but tape delay onto it because it makes it sound like it has a split second delay, the technique is called slap back delay. When putting these effects onto tracks it would be best to use busses as this gives you more control over the effects.
For Mastering your tracks, the first thing to do would be to make sure your track isn’t peaking, as in going red where the volume is. It is important to adjust the levels because if you didn’t you would have some instruments too overpowering, instruments that usually dominate the track would tend to be drums as they are just a loud instrument in general. Next I would put compressors on instruments to the levels where below -4db however what a compressor does is make the instrument sound louder in the overall mix. Depending on the genre/band/instruments involved with the compressor you could use a preset, it would be good to do this because it would make the song fit within the genre, for example house music because they usually have loads of drum and bass elements.
Jack Day 