i change the signal chain and take a listen. flipping eq before and after comp does sound different.

the big issue i hear is that compressors tend to kick in with long waveforms. that may be ok if the track is supposed to have a long waveform such as a kick. but say you have a bunch of rumble in your triangle track...well, you don't want the compressor kicking in there. so you filter it first.

i tend to try and use as little processing as possible and stick to one eq and one compressor.

to me it's one of those hearing dictates things. you may have recordings with no low end trash. but you may have a lot of it.

you can put a high pass on the master and A/B, or individual tracks. you can also look at a spec-meter and see if for example the guitar has lots of 30hz rumble which generally you don't want. and in each case you need to A/B and decide if the artifacts (phase shift) are worth the eq.

as others have said you can def make things sound unnatural with too much high pass. a shelf can be a less extreme and more pleasant sound.

but this is so dependent on the recordings you get. bad mic placement or room modes can put a 30hz boost on every track.

i used to hate it when people gave answers like this. but it's so true.

in one project i replaced all a-drums with bfd samples.

in my daw i detect transients then convert transients to midi. this isn't a perfect process. some transients are not detected. and sometimes the midi created needs a trick because it does not reflect the true dynamics of the performance (usually a bunch of 127 velocity hits).

after the midi is in place and has the right dynamics solo the replacement and original and check for phase issues. if there are any, sometimes there aren't, i slide all the midi a bit.

i completely replace the drums. so even with some phase issues they don't show up. i do keep the overheads but they are high band passed.

for this project it made my good drums sound great. bfd lets you blend in 3 different room mics and a couple of mics for important drums (3 snare mics)

this is one of my 2 fav books on mixing.

the audio i got was in waves. and i ripped it all to samplitude sessions.

been i while but i really liked the talk on iterative approach (totally true), that big time mixers are payed for vision not technical ability, and the audio is super super helpful imo. hearing is really the only way to describe music.