I'm just wondering if anyone else has come across this or can explain to me why I am noticing this. I am mixing a pop country song. I have compressor plugs all over the place like on individual drums, drum buses, vocals, bass, etc. I also have compression at the main stereo bus and then a limiter also. First of all, all these plugins are the ones that come with Cubase 4 as I dont really own any high-end compressors. Most of them have presets for their specific purposes so I've been using a lot of the presets and then tweaking from there. I'm trying to watch all my gain staging carefully and making sure that I dont clip anywhere. I'm using -3 as my top range anywhere but some of the compressors dont really tell you how hot their output is in db so I just go by the track output.

So my point is that, by the time I get to the final output, it seems kind of harsh sometimes in the high-end . Almost as if I need to do a steep low pass filter at around 18k or so. Anyone have an idea where I might make adjustments to help this? I'd like to post an example but it's original material that's not mine so I really shouldnt. Thanks,

E