I can hear all the parts; so you do have definition.... however, the guitars sound very sculpted and scooped out, as if you took a carving knife to everything between 400 and 2k or so...

There's also quite a bit of phasing on your top end - cymbals sound very swirly, as well as the upper end of the vocals. I don't know if this happened during the conversion to MP3 or if it's happening at the source.

The kick has a nice "click" but is lacking weight and body (oomph).

Low mids are pretty muddy.

It's a fun song - more reminiscent to Queen than Beach Boys, though. ;)

Beach boyish? It's more like Metallica meets Boston.

You are most obviously a guitarist? They were too upfront. And flip that phrase on your bass drum. It'll give you more of that CPR effect. This song needs to kick the crap out of ya. And it's almost there now. You just have to squeeze harder. But that all depends on Depends?

Those vocals are really the selling point here. The choral parts were fabulous. They should be more prominent, not the guitars. People just don't give enough credence to the vocals carrying a song. It ain't about the guitars. Not on this song. It's about the vocals, the drums and bass. The guitars are your sustaining underminer. They're big. They're fat. And they're there but it's about the vocals. You've got a great sounding lead vocal! Don't screw anymore with it. And the backup vocals are tremendous sounding!

I think people are forgetting that it's the vocalists that make the band? It ain't the guitars. It ain't the drums. It ain't the bass guitar. Yes, those still have to be upfront and prominent. But this is a cool vocal sound and song. You need to really feature that prominently. You don't need to recut anything. The performance is there. You've got it down. Now just tweak the mix a little bit more and you will WOW everybody.

Donny is talking about the same thing on the bass drum that I'm talking about. Of course your bass drum is in phase now. But it's not in phase. It's not in phase to the rest of the drums. That's why you need to flip and invert the phase of the bass drum. What this will do is to cause the right kind of phase cancellation. Everybody keeps getting this wrong and I don't know why? The bass drum is the only drum that is miked from inside, underneath on the backside. It's not on the batter side like the rest of the drumsticks are. So the microphone inside the bass drum needs to be phase inverted, to all of the other drum microphones to get that forward push out of the speakers. Instead of them sucking in. Now that will rock your world and everyone else's together. Try it? You'll like it.

I'm not the first engineer to figure this out.
Mx. Remy Ann David

...except that if it's a sampled kick... and to my ears it sounds like one - and especially if it's synthesized sample kick, and designed from the source on-up using "fake" sounds from various VCO's and waveforms like the old 808's, then it wasn't recorded with a mic anywhere on anything, never mind on the other audience side of the kick drum. I don't believe that there's a phase issue on the kick, it just lacks a warmer EQ to sell it. Truthfully? All the drums sound fake to me, in terms of the lack of imaging and presence that you'd get from a miked up kit with overheads. I find it very hard to believe that those cymbals are real. They might have been played by a real drummer through triggers, but those drums sound pretty midi based to me... perhaps an electronic kit? I could be wrong, of course. It's happened once before. LOL ;)

IMHO of course.

d/