Thank you Page, I was hoping you would bite on this one.
Musically it's a bit variable, covering new wave, avant-garde, experimental, so typically vocs, guitar, bass and drums, but with percussion, strings, keyboards, a bit of everything I suppose. I realise with a full mix and not always the best quality recording it will be difficult, even with multiband compression, to isolate and zoom in on the frequency of, say, a snare drum without affecting some element of the guitars and vocals.
One route I am looking at as a starter is lowering the overall level of the full mix by something like 6dB to give some headroom, and then using upward expansion to try to accentuate the dynamics of the drum hits which might otherwise be buried in the mix. This might help me pick up those snare hits and do something with them. Do you think there is there any mileage in this?