Hi Dags,
Been listening to this track and must agree that it poses quite a challenge to get the mix to sound right and cohesive, not least because of ear fatigue!
In my humble opinion, the first thing that one needs to do is get his hands dirty and start off with some serious editing to the drums and guitars - no amount of mix wizardry will fix erratic timing! I have not tried my hand at it yet, but I am pretty sure it will take the best part of an afternoon (if, like me, you get bored easily and need constant tea breaks
).
After that, I would work on the general drum sound to get it more akin to the genre - you know, clicky kick drum very present in the mix, thundering toms and a heavy-bottomed wet snare, smooth rounded-off cymbals, relatively low in the mix. I would also consider some drum replacement/sample augmenting...
Your guitar sounds are in the right spot and with some timing editing should now gel with the drums and bass. I would play around with eq settings of the different parts and depending on their relative panning mirroring the eq differences to some degree.
The main vocals in your present mix sound a bit too forward and dry and the backings could do with a little more thickening. I would use a reverb that is a little thicker, with a 7 - 11 ms predelay coupled with a quarternote delay that you could bring in during particular accents. Maybe the Main Vox could do with some heavy parallel processing to liven it up a bit (and maybe some pitch correction??)?
Oh, and as an aside, I believe that we ALL ought to be extremely grateful for having Mike keeping up a forum like this and sharing his passion, knowledge, and know-how with anyone that enjoys music technology, at whatever level.
Cheers,
Clinton
