Hi there ..
i'm working on electronic music, techno especially .. Everything is going into mastering for vinyl .. i know that the mastering studio can make it all sound louder but i still like to give them the best sounding thing i can ..

the problem i'm having right now is getting good slap on my instruments (Snare and Kick) especially without peaking my meters ..

I'm mixing in Cubase, i find what's happening is that i'm losing a good 3 or 4 db of headroom because small artifacts, usually too hard attack which peak out the meters .. so my overall mix is having to go lower .
. i know it's fine for the mastering studio but when i send out demo's my mix is very low comapre to even other peoples stuff that has yet to be mastered ..

For a long time i was having a serious problem with my kicks, but i started studying my Wavesand figured out what were the best sounding kicks (or looking kicks) .. as for snares it's a bit harder ..

right now i'm without studio and my audio is all in my laptop .. i'm wondering if there is way to really tame the slap on my snare without re-recording it (from my jo-mox drum machine ) .. i'm not sure if compression will help here or limiting .. the Jomox is a difficult drum machine as there are so many paremeters for each drum sound that the smallest increment will change the shape of the wave completely ..

my next little question is :
i know it's all relative but i find it difficult to sometimes figure out placement of instruments, volume wise .. what is too loud a kick ?
how much louder should a kick be than the rest of the mix or is it just sounding louder because of the energy in its freq. range ..

I once made a song that sounds nice on home stereo's but when i played it out in a club on vinyl the bass line was way too loud and overpowered the kick .. if ind this very difficult in mixing to figure out what should be louder or what should be cut or eq'd to not interfere with eachother ..

I'm trying to listen to all kinds of music to learn about placement, now i'm just confused as it seems there are millions of variations ..

a band that i don't really like but find there mixes so tight for Electronic music is Daftpunk .. the very compressed dry sound where the kick sounds almost in the same freq. range as the snare .. kind of neat ..

if anyone would like me to post some music of mine and others i work with to make a little study let me know .. any help would be greatly appreciated ..

Jeremy