Ulp, I'm beginning to know what you're speaking of (brick limitor! tho I know not what it is exactly - think I get what it does!)
Thanks for the primer on faders/gain/overloading. Funny, it seems a common problem I've seen perusing here and elsewhere is the mix being too low volume and/or distortion/overloading is there. One little hill atta time. (Do your drums really stay at those lower peakes?)
For general interest re: my machine tascam 246 and it's eq section function, just received an almost definitive reply from a trusted friend (Loo). He's many years upscaled from a 4-track (that's why I say "almost" definitive), and I knew he could help this past month, but the man just became a father, dursn't bother him...yet y'all have been here to walk me through these things.
Here is Loo's bit: "As I recall, the 'bottom' button ( ie tier) is the sweepable portion of the EQ knob (for example, picture a normal "Equalizer" with 30 adjustable
> faders, 10 for bass, 10 for mid, and 10 for high). I'm pretty sure
> the bottom half of the knob on the 246 machine (and my 244 machine) is
> the same as adjusting faders, ie, all the way turned down would be
> dropping the low end, and all the way up would be boosting the high
> end, and everything in between (I hope this makes sense). The 'top'
> half of the knob is the overall volume."
And Prometheus, Loo then went on to pass onto me a mixing trick someone gave him long ago, and it was exactly how you explained to do it: sweep the frequency til one finds something BAD, then cut that.
Loo ended his note: "In
> other words, rather than trying to find 'good' EQ levels and boost
> them, he'd search for 'nasty' EQ levels and drop them."
I hope to be re-recording this week.