I'm a novice mixer with very little prior experience. I would LOVE to get your feedback/pointers and hope to improve in the process of reading your replies
This is a pretty good mix IMHO. However, the one thing that stood out to me was the lead vocal - it sounded almost distorted in places. Did you have hard compression on it? If so, maybe try backing that off and smoothing it out with automation - I had to use LOTS of automation on my mix to get the vocal smooth. I did notice that you backed off the compression on the mix bus on your second mix.