Hey guys, I'm currently using MC6T. It seems every time I come up with a decent beat they all have a common problem... the Drums are too weak. Sure you can hear them fine.. but the kick drum just doesnt bump your chest like it should and the snare drum just doesnt have that awesome crack that stands out from everything else.
 
I use Rough Rider from Audio Damage as the compressor and the Cakewalk Studioverb. These work great for beefing the sound up a ton. But every time I feel the drums are hitting hard enough.. they are usually overloading so I have to turn the volume down on the track to compensate. I've tried turning all other tracks down to kind of highlight the drums.. then I notice the drums still seem weak compared to most songs from people who know what they are doing lol (compared way too much just to make sure I wasn't just being stupid lol).
 
So whats the trick I'm missing to get them hitting harder without overloading? 
 
Also why I'm writing this figured I'd get one more question in... How do I apply an effect to only a certain part of a clip? For instance Say I'm working on making a single note bass swell that I want to gradully apply a wobble effect towards the end of the clip. As I want the bass to come in hard and swell to max volume then start to wobble. How do I make the effect gradually increase at the end of the clip? basically I want the effect to fade in at what ever part I choose on a single clip.
 
Thanks guys

Basically, judicious use of EQ and compression. Compression alone won't automatically make the drums big. You have to figure out what frequencies you want the kick and snare to sit in and reserve that space for them. A good compressor will allow you to change the shape of the drum sound by altering its transients and bringing out the sound of the drum itself. Then you use EQ to remove the frequencies that you don't want to hear. This will emphasize the frequencies you want to keep.
 
Don't put any reverb on your drums until you are happy with the sound dry.
 
To apply an effect to a part of a clip, use automation to dial the effect in or out as needed. You can also create a send, place the effect there and automate the send level.
 
Of course, all of this advice assumes you can hear what you are doing. You'll need good monitors and a proper mixing environment as well.
 
Hope this helps a bit. There are lots of books on mixing that can really help. I would recommend "Mixing Secrets" by Mike Senior. It is a very accessible read.
 
Regards,
Dan
 

I had a teacher in grade school who liked to get everyone's attention by smacking a ruler on his desk. It would make everyone jump - unless the class was making so much noise that the ruler-smack got lost in the din. Even though it was just as loud as always, it lost its impact because it was no longer loud relative to the sounds it had to compete against. In mixing terms, the peak-to-average ratio (also known as "crest factor") was too low. 
 
Loudness and punch are relative. For example, a drum hit is impactful only if it rises significantly above everything around it, including its own sustain. IOW, how hot it is relative to everything else. 
 
Trying to make everything loud makes nothing loud. If loud drums are paramount, then you have to be prepared to sacrifice other instruments toward that end. 
 
Plugins such as Rough Rider can actually work against you in this regard. They'll make drums sound fatter, but at a cost: namely, flattening out each hit so it no longer rises as far above the surrounding sound. The consequence is reduced punch. A big part of mixing drums, and indeed all mixing, is finding a balance between peak and average levels. Rough Rider lowers the crest factor by raising average levels while lowering peaks. 
 
 
The kick is especially challenging, because we simply don't hear low frequencies well. It takes a whole lot more energy to make low frequencies sound loud. This is why many mixers start with the kick and reference everything else to it. You can't just keep turning the kick up when it starts to disappear into the mix, or you'll end up right where you are now, with no headroom left.
 
Try applying the compressor to just the kick rather than the whole kit, then adjust the rest of the kit accordingly. If the kick starts to disappear, don't raise it - lower everything else.
 
As for the second part of your question, the answer is automation. Presumably you're using a synthesizer for the bass; the wobble is amplitude modulation and can be automated to come in exactly when you want it to, and how quickly. The exact instructions for doing this will depend on the synth, but any synth that has a knob for adjusting the modulation amount can be so automated.

Just a few more ideas that may also potentially help in this case. Many important ones have already been covered.
 
Some people think that kick and bass should always be below a certain frequency.This is often not true. If you've ever listened to a great mix heard from  a low end speaker with little bass you can still hear the transient from the bass drum because the mixer isolated elements of it that were higher in the EQ spectrum. Accentuating that portion of the kick and boosting it slightly in higher ranges sometimes helps.
 
If you find that there are  other parts conflicting with the kick you could apply a slight amount of side chain compression to the opposing parts.This would be a last resort over making room with EQ and other measures.
 
As you build a mix you will find that there is a cumulative effect in track gain stages. If at the beginning of the mix a track seemed ok, but after adding several plugs with gain or when you add a  mastering plug-in everything is crazy loud...it's probably time to pull everything back down and re adjust gains.Some mixers stay at -6db or less in all beginning tracks. This is usually a rule of thumb I use to start and I still need to back off of things.

bitflipper
I had a teacher in grade school who liked to get everyone's attention by smacking a ruler on his desk. It would make everyone jump - unless the class was making so much noise that the ruler-smack got lost in the din. Even though it was just as loud as always, it lost its impact because it was no longer loud relative to the sounds it had to compete against. In mixing terms, the peak-to-average ratio (also known as "crest factor") was too low. 
 
Loudness and punch are relative. For example, a drum hit is impactful only if it rises significantly above everything around it, including its own sustain. IOW, how hot it is relative to everything else. 
 
Trying to make everything loud makes nothing loud. If loud drums are paramount, then you have to be prepared to sacrifice other instruments toward that end. 
 
Plugins such as Rough Rider can actually work against you in this regard. They'll make drums sound fatter, but at a cost: namely, flattening out each hit so it no longer rises as far above the surrounding sound. The consequence is reduced punch. A big part of mixing drums, and indeed all mixing, is finding a balance between peak and average levels. Rough Rider lowers the crest factor by raising average levels while lowering peaks. 
 
 
The kick is especially challenging, because we simply don't hear low frequencies well. It takes a whole lot more energy to make low frequencies sound loud. This is why many mixers start with the kick and reference everything else to it. You can't just keep turning the kick up when it starts to disappear into the mix, or you'll end up right where you are now, with no headroom left.
 
Try applying the compressor to just the kick rather than the whole kit, then adjust the rest of the kit accordingly. If the kick starts to disappear, don't raise it - lower everything else.
 
As for the second part of your question, the answer is automation. Presumably you're using a synthesizer for the bass; the wobble is amplitude modulation and can be automated to come in exactly when you want it to, and how quickly. The exact instructions for doing this will depend on the synth, but any synth that has a knob for adjusting the modulation amount can be so automated.

 +1
 

What are you using for drums?  What do you mean by big and hard hitting?  Give some examples of drums that sound like what you're trying to achieve.  I don't know if MC6T has the same capabilities as Sonar as far as bussing goes but here's what I do in Sonar:
 
To me, there's a difference between "Loud" and "Big."  Drums don't have to be loud to sound huge--and conversely loud drums aren't always huge (punk drums are loud, but aren't usually huge.  Prog rock drums aren't always loud but are usually huge).  
 
In my opinion, big drums are created in a big room with a really good and well-tuned drumkit; if I have the luxury I'll book time in a good studio to get that sound. Since I don't always have a budget and I don't have a huge room of my own I close mic the entire kit and try to suppress as much of the ugliness of my room as possible.  After recording I start by bussing my drum tracks.  I create a buss for two kick mics (beater and outside); two snare mics (top and bottom), the toms, and the overheads--I don't always use both kick drum mics or both snare mics, but it's nice to have them.  
 
Once I get the individual drum tracks tweaked (if needed: EQ, compression, etc.) to where they're sounding decent, I turn to the busses to adjust the levels between them.  Each buss is then sent to an "everything buss" so I have one place to control the level of the entire kit.  This everything buss has a send to a buss with a good reverb (usually a room simulation since my tracks are really dry)--I like doing it this way instead of in the drum buss' FX bin because I'll sometimes send other instruments to this same reverb buss to put them in the same room--sometimes I'll just send the individual drum busses instead of the everything buss to the reverb buss, for instance if I don't want a lot of "room" sound on the kick.  If they're still not big enough, send the drum buss and the reverb buss to a buss with some seriously heavy compression on it.  You'll have to fine tune the levels on these busses to suit your song.  
Even when I'm not using a live drummer, I have a track dedicated to each part of the drum kit (kick, snare, toms, cymbals/overheads, room).  Then I do pretty much the same thing i described previously (I tend to use samples that have an option to turn on or off the room mics).
 
This is like a 30,000 foot view of the way I do drums--an overview.  It's kind of pointless to go into the details about it since my drums and recordings are probably very different from what you're working with.  Also, I'm not a drummer.

in addition to what others have said, let me add: use a gate. frequency and tone is only half the equation. the other is time. the impact of a punch is felt by the absence surrounding it.
 
even with a clean drum sample, a gate shapes those few milliseconds of "pow" that you are looking for against the tone of the drum. for the kick, unless you are going for the trash drum sound, the compressor should be applied transparently - limiting the signal without changing the color of the sound.
 
with the snare drum compression can be applied more liberally, but again the gate should control the punch or you are simply elongating what you are actually trying to shorten.
 
i would recommend running drums and backing instruments (i.e., not vocals, lead guitars, etc.) into the same buss and applying some compression there after you've already shaped the sound you want on individual drum tracks. properly applied, this will "push" the instrumentation down during the "punches" and let it breathe between hits. again a light touch is the best approach.
 
also realize that during those punchy times you may have 2 or 3 hits (cymbals, hats, snare, kick). each of these needs to occupy their own space so use some EQ band sweeping to find the sound you want from each part of the kit in terms of attack (a.k.a. "punch"). nothing kills a kit faster than washy hats/cymbals. you can practically turn the hat off and once you are done compressing everything else it will pop out like you never touched it.
 
finally if you want a beefy kick sound then the bass has got to take its ball and go home. one way to do it is run both kick and bass on the same buss and use a compressor that allows the attack of the kick to trigger the compressor which in turn "ducks" the bass for a split-second. this naturally requires the bass signal to be lower than that of the kick but typically that's not an issue if you haven't compressed the kick into oblivion. and it is still necessary to high-pass one or the other.
 
it will take a fair bit of experimentation but the key is to watch and listen the signal in whatever FX plug you are using for the gate and compressor. you want "blips" vs. "stop lights", if that makes sense. your eyes should confirm what your ears hear.

Rimshot

bitflipper
I had a teacher in grade school who liked to get everyone's attention by smacking a ruler on his desk. It would make everyone jump - unless the class was making so much noise that the ruler-smack got lost in the din. Even though it was just as loud as always, it lost its impact because it was no longer loud relative to the sounds it had to compete against. In mixing terms, the peak-to-average ratio (also known as "crest factor") was too low. 
 
Loudness and punch are relative. For example, a drum hit is impactful only if it rises significantly above everything around it, including its own sustain. IOW, how hot it is relative to everything else. 
 
Trying to make everything loud makes nothing loud. If loud drums are paramount, then you have to be prepared to sacrifice other instruments toward that end. 
 
Plugins such as Rough Rider can actually work against you in this regard. They'll make drums sound fatter, but at a cost: namely, flattening out each hit so it no longer rises as far above the surrounding sound. The consequence is reduced punch. A big part of mixing drums, and indeed all mixing, is finding a balance between peak and average levels. Rough Rider lowers the crest factor by raising average levels while lowering peaks. 
 
 
The kick is especially challenging, because we simply don't hear low frequencies well. It takes a whole lot more energy to make low frequencies sound loud. This is why many mixers start with the kick and reference everything else to it. You can't just keep turning the kick up when it starts to disappear into the mix, or you'll end up right where you are now, with no headroom left.
 
Try applying the compressor to just the kick rather than the whole kit, then adjust the rest of the kit accordingly. If the kick starts to disappear, don't raise it - lower everything else.
 
As for the second part of your question, the answer is automation. Presumably you're using a synthesizer for the bass; the wobble is amplitude modulation and can be automated to come in exactly when you want it to, and how quickly. The exact instructions for doing this will depend on the synth, but any synth that has a knob for adjusting the modulation amount can be so automated.

+1
 

Yep, saved me a thumb callous, did Mr. Bit.