The most stressful topic for producers.
Your music's mixing: do you do it or not and how do you feel about it

After about 10 years, I've gotten to a point where I feel confident about it and can mix most anything I make in a week. I think trying to learn from YouTube is a nightmare of being recommended different shit, and I can tell you exactly what I do as I mix some stuff today.

Firstly, this'll work better if you make music like I do. Driving beat, not a lot of live instruments or focus on sweeping dynamics.
Secondly, most of what makes my mixes happens in composition. I EQ/compress and add fx there. My "what you hear is what you get" approach.

EQ: I take shit out a lot. I take more and more out with each draft. I am cutting shit out much, much more often than I'm ever adding. I do this on songs in the original project file, before I bounce tracks and move to the "mixing" file.

CHANNEL STRIPS: I only recently started using these because they're so overwhelming but are really just combining a lot of common needs into one plugin. Every sound could benefit, but I end up using this on drums, guitars, vocals and bass and it's actually useful

COMP: I will try to be generalized about plugins in this thread, but the Vulf Compressor is actually magic and unfairly good. I use this when drums need HELP, like when I'm using a very old breakbeat sample, or when I need things to be glued more. It's really too good.

PANNING: Pan shit more. I'd go so far as to say every single sound needs to be making use of stereo, but audible in mono. Place things in an ear. Use ping-pong delay or very short stereo delays to fill things out. Pan secondary drum layers to widen drum hits. MOVE IT AROUND

PANNING (cont'd): For a long time I thought of the center channel as "normal", and if you think like I did, you will end up having all of your sounds fighting all the time. I do all right making sure bass and drums and sometimes vox dominate the center, fuck the rest.

VOLUMES: Look into "gain staging", it's a complicated-sounding word that basically means making sure your sounds are turned down BEFORE they're thrown through your effects chain, which will change their volume at every stage.

VOLUMES (cont'd): So without gain staging, by lowering your track volume at the end of an effects chain, you might not actually be turning down the sound itself but just its presence.
Before I bounce out my tracks, I have everything turned down under -6 dB (kinda arbitrary)

For my final mix, I export every stem to another project, drop it in there, make last volume adjustments and put my master chain on the master channel. That consists of:
1. A buss compressor. I stick it on and just make it so the needle is barely dancing as the biggest drums hit

2. Final equalization. The VEQ for some vast adjustments and sloping off lowest and highest frequencies, EQP1A for an unearthly boost at 30Hz that is magic and MEQ5 for playing with my midrange which is the bane of my existence

3. A clipper! This gets you back all your volume you lost by turning things down and then some. But it's sensitive and you will hear what destruction it's causing if you go too far.

4. The IMPusher is another case where I wish I could recommend something more general but the specific plugin is, as you can see, "magic". I use the "magic" knob to clarify and glue things one last time and the bottom right one to push a bit more with a clipper or limiter

5. Then I finish everything by using a Waves L2 maximizer to bring things together just a bit more. I never go more than -0.9 dB on that threshold. Then I check my RMS values using DBFS+3 metering with Voxengo SPAN free version (which I constantly use to check freqs in producing)

If you have questions, I'm talkative today. I'm by no means a professional at this, but like many of you I could not afford to hire someone to mix for me and NEEDED to learn myself, ASAP. This is my tried and true process that gets my stuff out and sounding like it did in my head