bussing and using a compressor to glue sounds together?

[bobby yarrow]

I'd suggest you read something like the izotope mastering guide, has a great section describing what a compressor does, how it's different from a limiter or an expander etc. Free too. http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/guides.html

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Mixing to stem busses is pretty much the way every engineer I know works. Some things can go right to the 2-buss, but most things don't. In my mixes, nothing goes right to the 2-buss.

Nothing goes wrong if you choose the right compressor (model), ratio and threshold. Good mixers use low compressio ratios, like 1:2 or even less (1:12 only on clean guitars). On some genre, 6 dB compression (the standard achieved by newbies) is awfully a lot.

But even a 12dB compression coul be right, if you "add" this compressed signal to the original, keeping the compressed at a low gain (using parallel compression: even -20 dB below). The secret is always the same: the less is more.
"Parallel compression" here is used like a subtle tool, it helps in "glueing" your tracks.

Other tips for the original poster: synchronize everything: pre-delay times (in your reverb programs), attack and release times, delays, chorus/flangers times "before" compression. It depends on the genre, but try this: apply a gate to your snare drum, and fade out tails, so the reverb stops exactly when you have the next botton drum and so on. Even keeping low gains for your new track. The tracks will glue themselves when (and only when) your drums breathe in the right way.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

I'd suggest you read something like the izotope mastering guide, has a great section describing what a compressor does, how it's different from a limiter or an expander etc. Free too. http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/ozone/guides.html

Izotope and waves manuals are a good starting points (especially for newbies), but I would suggest "the mixing engineer's handbook" and some bob katz paper. Here you learn a lot, because you discover great engineers have a similar background and they say and apply the same tips, even if they mixes different sources/genres.