Don’t overlook the idea of a reference track that you can base your final mix off of. Get a good spectrum analyzer and loudness meter like Voxengo’s SPAN and Youlean loudness meter (the free versions of both are more than enough for a release on something like Bandcamp or Beatport) and measure your tracks against ones you’ve heard in clubs or on good systems that have stood out as particularly well mixed. Often I find that tracks that sound right but are just lacking the club-ready polish have too little/too much dynamic range, or there is a whole mess going on in the bottom end that isn’t audible to me but is still info for a compressor/limiter/saturator/etc to react to. There really isn’t a worry that you will be stealing someone’s sound this way, as there are pretty clear boundaries as to what translates well to speakers that can be gathered from pretty much any music vaguely in the same genre as the type you are making!
In terms of usable techniques some cookie-cutter things that most people do include using the internal sidechain on buss compressors to not react to the low fundamental of kicks (Ableton 11’s init Compressor preset has this enabled by default hidden behind the little arrow next to the on/off button) and cutting out the lows of sounds that really don’t need them like hihats and even cutting out everything below the fundamental for stuff like toms. Little bumps around 5k on snares and claps can help bring the snap out a little, while cuts in the 120-550hz ranges can cut a little of boomy sound they carry, scooped mids on kicks with bumps around the click can let a kick cut through without having to also bring up the body of the kick, and carving space between hihats and rides can make the peak part of a techno track not clangorous (usually the cymbal sitting a little below the hats in the frequency domain). The nice thing about techno tracks is usually most of this can be done in the 2channel domain, since there is usually little channel complexity in dancefloor tracks.
If the presets that sound the best to you are the ones that drop the bass a bit and bring up the mids, maybe one of the issues is that your kicks and bass are too loud initially, so any corrective measures after will have to be tailored around those instruments, leaving less space for the lead or other percussion to be treated in a 2channel environment. I know I often track kicks in hot, especially if its from an already heavy jam session when the clubs are closed. Just be hyper conscious of levels pre recording. If you don’t want the computer to get too in the way, just have a fullscreen spectrum analyzer opened and periodically glance at it to see if your kicks are way too hot. Will cut loads of time off the corrective staging of producing if the ingredients are all proportioned before baking!
Honestly Ableton’s stock stuff has come a long way, and is a perfectly viable, and probably much faster, way to turn a raw jam into a club, car, or casual listening ready track compared to plugins and hardware.
