G-con im here to make frineds and learn mate. TBH i am new to doing it "properly" I spend almost a year making rubbish unmastered dry sounding trance tracks that had no musical structure LOL. Im just interested in how to take a track that I am happy with and make it clean crisp as loud as it could be without clipping and how to prevent my instruments mudding up. Your help is appreciated!

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Processing a highly structured and complex pattern of sensory input as a unified percept of "music" is probably one of the most elaborate features of the human brain.....understanding how music is perceived and how it may elicit intense sensations is far from being understood.

Completely understand mate and thats why my advice is to wait until your own production skills have improved before forking money out for something which may not improve your tracks in the slightest.

Using compression properly in practice is IMO one of the most difficult aspects to learn (I'm still learnig it bit by bit myself). You can easily make a track sound worse by using compression in the wrong way and many people on here will tell you that if you don't really know what you are doing with a compressor then don't stick it on a track just because you think you are supposed to as you'll probably ruin the track. There are actually a few producers here who don't use compressors at all and believe good mixing and eq'ing is all thats needed. I'm not actually suggesting this myself, merely pointing out that its only when you are more experienced that you know what you really need.

Remember there are plenty of good software compressors on the market which will be cheaper, some decent free ones as well. For me, I would only consider purchasing a hardware compressor once I felt I had mastered the use of them in general.

My 2 penneth

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Integrating hardware is easy in Cubase (I'm using Cubase 4), as long as you have enough inputs and outputs on your audio interface.

Obviously, research the compressors you're interested in. If you have enough studio experience you'll get a feel for what hardware you think will work for you. Definitely, for a couple of grand you'll be able to get a very nice analog compressor which will impart a certain sound to whatever you run through it. Each piece of equipment (or software) has a particular sound. There are hardware EQs which cost many thousands of dollars due to their sound characteristics. For some producers, that's money well spent. For others, that's crazy money. As long as the music is beautiful in the end...