>What you've described is indeed my usual approach. I was just doing >some experimenting, and seem to recall reading something a long time >ago about mixing a "squashed" submix in with the main drum mix to >give it more energy - this is what led to my post. Has anyone used >this technique? Or am I imagining things? Yes, I use it all the time. What I do....bus all the kit to e.g. buses 9 and 10. Create 2 different auxes with bus 9-10 as input, mix bus as output. One of these is the 'natural' bus, one the super-squashed one. Then you have to make sure that whatever plugins you put on one you put the same on the other (or something which introduces similar delay) or you'll get nasty phasing. Balance the two and you're sorted. I generally find that starting with the less compressed one and slowly mixing in the compressed (and sometimes brightened) one works best. I've tried feeding the squash bus from an aux, but this introduces a delay which differs from simply routing to a bus and I found bizarrely that this delay seemed to change between sessions (maybe I'd had too many late nights at that point).. so I gave up on that. j p.s. Merry Christmas everyone! Jon Cotton Guaranteed High Quality Gramophone, the album http://www.darkgramophone.co.uk Artisan Audio / Artisan Records http://www.artisan-audio.co.uk/