Tom eq's top 10 tips 1 - during a fill try filtering a long swooping pad or white noise sample reducing LF towards the drop. Maybe send it to some side chain compression too or a gate. 2 - To build a vocal or synth part up try automating a delay and gradually opening up the feedback until a drop takes place. 3 - Percussion - Send these to a buss with a nice compressor to glue the sounds together, also try a bit of sonic enhancement (BBE Sonic Maximizer) after the compressor on the chain. 4 - using more than one vocal sound, try eq'ing them differently to make them stand out/ seperate from the other samples, also try a channel strip on funny settings. I've been using the Waves SSL channel strip and using a violin preset getting a full bodied vocal different from a main vocal. 5 - mess about with pug in chains. try a compressor than add a delay effect then a reverb then a gate. why not see what happens. Bounce it all down to audio, arrange it and fuck it, add some more effects!! 6 - Kicks - Layer them, get a nice subby one, layer a clicky fast transient kick and eq to perfection. Also if you kick is full try removing 50% or so from the back of it to use as an intro kick drum. When you paste the full kicks audio after the first drop you will notice a more urgent feel. 7 - hi hats - try using an auto panner/ tremelo to get some movement in the higer frquencies 8 - Synths - Stick with one and learn it. Make you own presets and your own sounds. 9 - Analyse those frequncies - Stick a frequency analyser on the master channel. If your having trouble identifying a muddy element in your mix you can solo channels and identify tracks that may have overlapping frequencies and therefore bringing you headroom up. Eq them as need for clarity. 10 - Stop going on internet forums all the time and make music damn it!