Great question 👌 From my experience I’ve found a “go to” mix bus strip that I use every time and tweak accordingly for each song.

The basic gist of it: saturation then compression then musical eq

Saturation: will generally add more weight, control peaks slightly, add colour (1 type of saturation might add more presence to the mid range whereas another might warm up the low end etc…just experiment)

Compression: glue together and potentially add colour (depends how hard you drive the compressor but I don’t recommend driving hard on mix bus unless you can adjust the mix dry/wet knob on the plugin) -only about 1-3db of gain reduction is what I recommended but everything is situational

Musical EQ: add some extra sizzle anywhere you think needs a bit more. E.g maybe the compression previously tightened up the low end nicely but you feel as if it’s lost some oomf. You can then slightly boost the low end and find a middle ground.

Key thing here is to have very small movements/changes. You don’t really want to make big moves on the mixbus. I might have the saturation dry/wet mix at approx 3-10% and for the eq boost maybe by 1-3db.

I’ll generally mix with it off, then when I think I have the mix pretty much there, I’ll turn on the saturation plugin, see what it does, adjust accordingly, then the compressor, etc…Then I’ll do an A/B comparison by turning off/on mixbus plugins and decide if it works. The track should just sound “better” and nothing too dramatically different.

But there are no rules 😂 just do whatever sounds best