Everybody's Falling Apart

[pauli]

This mix is pretty tough to pin down... I've been trying on and off for months to figure it out. The kick is still pretty absent in version 3, but given how much effort you've put into it, my thinking is that the sample they used (this is a simulated kit I think) is lousy and no fault of yours. What DAW are you using? Some of them have really good facility for automatically replacing audio files with single note midi files, so you could probably find a more suitable kick drum sample and trigger it with midi like niells suggested. If you're using reaper I could easily explain to you how to do it using the supplied plugins, but I'm not sure with other DAWs. I was using Sonar Home Studio 7 for the longest time, but it's really limited in terms of routing and what you're able to do without wasting time programming the kick drum parts from scratch. We have kids, so we haven't got the time .

Another suggestion is to consider finding the main frequencies of the vocal part and giving them a slight broadband boost. Then you can invert the EQ, bypass it on the vocal track, and copy the new settings in some of the guitar parts into a separate instance of EQ at the end of the FX chain. That help with some of the small masking issues I'm hearing, which could be the result of tonal changes introduced by the processing that follow your first instance of EQ used for cleanup.

Great work, and I really respect your continued efforts to improve your mixes based on the excellent suggestions you get from more experienced mixers . That kinda stuff is hard when you have a family who needs your time... I have a 2 year old and a 5 year old, so finding the time to mix at all is a burden.