[chillytc]

I apologize that this isn't per se a gear question but I was hoping some of the more experienced folks on this board could offer me some direction on a problem I am having. For context, I am a guitar player first and do not claim to be an expert in recording although I have accumulated a reasonable set of gear for recording demos (Tab V78M, Great River pres, a Germanium, a couple of Distressors and a Digi 002 with a reasonable selection of plugins).

I am mixing a heavy rock track and trying, in essence, to get every instrument as big as possible (big drums, slamming bass, giant guitars, big vox) and am struggling with running out of room in the mix. For example, I can get the drums sounding slamming and the guitars really cutting but then when I try to pull the bass up to be prominent I either run out of headroom and have to pull everything back down and sort of start over or the bass starts to overshadow the drums.

I have tried using eq to carve out specific frequency spectrums for each instrument and that has helped to a degree but there is a limit to how much eq can be added before I start to transform the sound of the instrument in an undesirable way. It also appears to me that using *less* rather than more compression helps with this although I have the impression that that is not typically how these mixes are done (think Queens of the Stone Age or Foo Fighters as an example of the general direction of the intended sound).

I realize this is basically a "how do I mix" 101 question so I'm not asking that anyone try to advise me specifically what to do, although that would be welcome. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a book or some other educational material that I could get a hold of to help me educate myself to solve this problem as my preliminary conclusion is that this kind of thing is just trickier to mix and, given my lack of experience, I need to just do some woodshedding.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks.