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this is largely a genre thing, imo. if you track a bunch of acoustic/electric instruments from scratch, you have the benefit of using mic choice & placement, preamp choice, comp/limiting to tape, how hard to hit tape, etc. etc... as you gain experience in that milieu, you learn how to predict what is generally required to make something work within the arrangement. when it comes time to mix, less shaping is required, things tend to sit right.
then there's those of us who work more in electronic soundscapes, where the whole paradigm is different. if i lift a drum loop from an old burt bacharach record and drop it into an arrangement with a rhodes and big hall strings, odds are it'll need some eq'ing, maybe a lot of eq'ing, to sit well. ditto with any of the canned loops on cd's et al. i use stylus a lot, and i generally use two eq's in series to get it where i need it; first a cambridge or oxford for deep surgical cuts, notches, and peaks, that makes it the right general shape for the jigsaw. then a sonalksis or urs for broader sweeps and to sit it in the mix... brighter lifts it up or drops it down, midrange brings it forward or pushes it back, low mids makes it bigger or smaller.
as for digital hi's, i find that if i want to do serious lifting with a dig, i need to also use a cut to pull back the freqs that start to get offensive. in digital land, a broad q push with a targeted narrow q pullback works better than just a narrow q push, imo. narrow digital pushes sound unnatural to my ears.
gregoire
del ubik
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