Hey Bri, you're guiding light here to lend a hand!
I love the tune first and foremost, so that's a good thing. Ok, the mix itself needs some work, but let's take a look at a few things in the mastering chain first. Let me tell you how I know you hit it too hard with a limiter in the mastering procedure...
Listen to how you can hear the crack of your snare drum on the parts where the rhythms guitars are not hitting as hard...like before a chorus comes in. Hear it? Once your chorus kicks in with all the other instruments and stuff, your snare just falls away and more or less sounds like a little "tick" type sound and has completely lost its crack. This is because the limiter is trying to level everything and your snare is the first major thing that suffers from this. Hitting the limiter too hard makes the mix sound so..like this _____________________________
The little fluctuations in a mix where it would sound like this ___---___-_-----___--___ keep it interesting, maintain dymanics and it won't fatigue the listener. When you got a cool tune like you have here bro, the last thing you want to do is make it suffer due to super loud volume for the sake of "wow, hear how loud this is?!" For what it's worth...if you get a good mix that sounds incredible and were to master it and put it on a cd at -5dB or lower....you would literally have more clarity and GOOD volume just by cranking up your stereo over the super loud, limiter stuff that will distort and sound like ass when you crank it up...honest man. I love loud...but I love GOOD quality loud, not loud for the sake of saying "damn this is really loud" follow me?
Let's move on..
A bit too much sssssssssizzle in the cyms as well. You can either get rid of it (preferably) in the mix, or just phase it out when you master sweeping in on it at about 8k-12k most times.
Did you put some sort of verb on the drums or some spacializer? I think it's taking away from the drum presence as well. Something sounds artificially planted in there...especially on the snare. It almost seems to crack so wide that it sends itself to the right a bit more. Did you run some sort of HAAS effect or something there...or clone a track and offset it a few ticks? Something is weird there.
Vox still need to come up and lead guitar can come up also. As for your bass guitar, I feel it more than I can hear it so that tells me you accentuated low end as your volume instead of the actual volume on the bass. We all make this mistake all too often and most times the reason for this is the monitors we use, lack of a tuned room to make the right decisions...or we mixed in headphones.
Look into the low end on the bass...sounds like 60hz roughly to me. Take some of that out of there and when you lose a little volume from doing this, raise the fader level. If any of the bass lines leap out at you, compress it a bit more. It's ok to squash a bass in a tune like this as long as it doesn't completely kill the dynamics and bring on artifacts.
Dug your lead playing...we play a lot a like man, nice job!! Bring that solo up a bit more...when you do, you may want to bring down some of the effects in it as they will shine a bit more when the volume is up and it may be over-kill. A note on guitar effects if you're a lead player....
Try to be careful of long tails on reverbs...no long decays unless it's for effect purposes...on delays, watch for regenerations...I use no more than 4 unless it's for special effect purposes. Now, as far as how much effect to use....some people say "if you can hear it, you're using too much". I do NOT agree with that. If you don't want to hear an effect, you don't use it. If you want to hear it and you like the sound of it, use it just make sure you play clean.
A clean player can get away with using more effects unless of course it's over-kill. But to me, there are certain times when you use an effect to simply enhance something subtley...other times, you whack it in the friggin mouth and let it be heard. Verbs for example...used subtley and in moderation without using big halls and large decay times, can be awesome especially when you use the right amount of pre-delay in the verb. Other times, you might want some major ambience...but play clean and watch long tails or you get arunonsentencelikethisandthisiswhatitsoundslikeiny ourmusicsodon'teverdothisanduselongtailsok? LMAO!!
As for delays, I like them and like to hear them. As long as they are in time with the music and the player is not using them to hide his lack of playing or mistakes, they can be a beautiful thing. For delay's, I like the longer ones myself. The short, slap-back type stuff is way overdone for me. A nice long delay timed to the music with a tasty player is where it's at...especially in ballad type stuff.
So don't be afraid to experiment and have some fun. Remember, don't EVER read too much into what others say even if they are credible sources. There comes a time when you have to make the calls and the people listening also have to listen to what was presented, not what they think should go on in their own image. If you like something and it makes you feel good, you're right where you want to be bro. Good luck with everything...and I hope some of this helps.
