How many of you try to go for "final mix" sound on your cue mix and how do you do it?

[Quint]

I'm just curious about the extent that people go to achieve "mixed" sounds in their cue mixes. Obviously you can just send a cue mix with naked sounds. I'm just wondering how much some of you juice up your headphone mixes to provide a little bit of inspiration to the band and how you go about doing it and to what lengths you go?

[fooman]

I don't have a wicked huge studio with tons of outboard, so I can just EQ through my mixer when recording base tracks (drums most often). So I EQ the kick/snare to give the drummer something nice to hear. Maybe some verb on the snare if it's the right vibe.

If it's overdubs, I usually just EQ/compress things that the artist expects to sound a certain way and it's simply not gonna be there without some extra 'help'. Like kick, snare, vocals, bass.

I'd LOOOOVE a compressor to tracks vocals with, because I have to ride the fader a lot on my cue mixer and I don't always know exactly when the vocalist will be going from a sing to a scream or vice-versa haha.

But for instruments... I find that if there is no compression happening, the person playing will control their own dynamics a tad more. Perhaps it's just me fooling myself