Just wanted to clear something up that's been confusing me. When people mention frequencies that that start high-passing or low-passing at, is that the frequency at which they place the frequency knob in the eq or is it the frequency which should end up getting filtered out entirely?

Look at it this way: What is "entirely"? -20db? -60db? -120db?

There's setting on your spectral analyser that sets the minimal shown amplitude. Set it low enought and that frequency doesn't dissappear at all. While mixing, you're interested in what's happening in the first 10 - 20 db of dynamic range. (measured from the loudest sinewave)
...unless you do something like classical musc or jazz where the dynamic range is supposed to be much higher.

First, I'd check if this isn't made by either some distortion, saturation or tape/vinyl sim plugin. Sometimes those can generate some noise on purpose. If so, gate that particular track and you're done.

If that isn't the case, I'd suspect you might have dithering active on several stages of production. May be you render it out with dithering, turn dithering on in oZone and then render mastered result with dithering again? That might add up dither noise to the point it's audible.

Yea, there's always more you can do, but doing the most with very little and a huge understanding goes a longer way than just using something because you have a slight understanding of what it's used for. That leads to improper useage of tools, which was my point.

I'm agreeing with you again. Destiny!

...it's totally right.
"Yo, check this dope compressor. Hear it? It makes it SOOO MUCH FAATTTEERR". ...no man, it's squashed like crazy and your gain is way up.
"Yo man, it's too mono, it needs some stereo widening!" ...no man, it needs proper and thoguhtful panning.
"Yo, homie, what's the best limiter? Ozone's shit, I can't get my track loud!" ...learn what fletcher-munson curves are and look how much 2-5k your reference track has.

...and so on. I'm not an expert, but I totally get ya.

The question being begged is then, where do you draw the line between sound design and mixing?

I think we really shouldn't draw a line there. Imho good layering comes with layer-mixing. I usually like to consider every layer a new instrument. Idea of endless stacking and then "taming" the sound afterwards never really worked for me. Even when I tried (god knows this bassline had like 10 layers https://soundcloud.com/farleycz/linkin-park-steve-aoki-light) I always came to point that some of those layers needed some mixing to actually work with the rest.

Edit: On the second thought, if we had to draw that line, multiband compression (or expansion) would imho definitely belong to the sound design part. Imho in mixing, multiband compression should really be just for fixing problematic "unstable" sounds that you can't fix otherwise. Same goes for the other fancy stuff. Either you're fixing a problem, or you're doing sound design. That might be actually a good definition of that line.

https://theproducersforum.com/index.php?topic=2035

https://theproducersforum.com/index.php?topic=988

 

I don't finish a track in a week. Not even close. But I seriously doubt paid connection with other similarly troublesome guys would help me. For three reasons:

1) You have forum like this, where all you described either already happens, or can happen quite easily for free.

2) There's much larger percentage of people that need help over people that can actually provide some help. That's why WIP sections tend to be kinda quiet. I don't think your paid community would be an exception.

3) I don't know how much you plan to charge for this, but I think that good course, or new VST, or ticket to a good show, or anything else that gets you inspired is kinda better investment.

Feel free to prove me wrong. For now sorry, but no.

...also, as this forum was launched with goal of producers helping each other, posting here such offering is kind of rude. People who made this forum invested a lot of time to it for free. If I was a mod, I'd have hard time deciding if this topic should stay here.

Probably oldschool now, but I loved Airbase tutorials really a lot. They teached me a ton of stuff back then.
He made a new one lately, considering he might return to doing them again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHGBaNPOULo

...he does more arrangement oriented "wlakthroughs", but with sound design tips. And they are awesome.