Thats a great reference track. It would be hard to not enjoy listening to that=-) Your talking about a parallel compression technique, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNU3aIJs88g I just took a good listen to that track on youtube. There's a lot of magic in it. It doesn't sound too effected. The drums sound as if they were played really well and consistently. While I did listen on headphones. I didn't pick up on anything that was too obvious out of the norm, (i.e. tons of compression and verb etc...)
The kick sounds really tight, like, its not there to add tons of low end. Its pointy, but not as much low end as the snare. Its merely a time reference. Another example of this type of mix is "I want your Sex" by George Micheal. If you watched people dance to this, they wouldn't accentuate the 1 and the 3.
The snare sound in the track has a REALLY strong note to it, it wouldn't surprise me to find that there was very deliberate tuning to get it in tune with the song, so they could really take advantage of that on mixdown. If the engineer made the kick sound just as big as the snare, it would take away from the track.
The other thing that stood out to me, was, Ill bet if you took other parts of the arrangement away, and/or solo'd the drums, they may not sound as big. There's a really great groove, which doesn't really come from the drums alone. Everything is in the pocket. There's a nice push and pull happening, that you wont get from just drums alone. I'm hearing two different bass sounds here, there's a 1 (2) And accent not that has a high end, and an 8th note pulse underneath. Hard to say if its just 1 bass performance or 2 different ones mixed together.
I've been working with superior drummer libraries a lot in my work, and, I recently picked up the ash soan midi pack, he's a great example of this type of pocket drummer. Its like, the guy can play straight quarter notes, and somehow it always sounds like its got the perfect pocket! That's whats happening here in this song.
Its never as hard as you think it is, and once you have 20 million plug ins happening, you know your on the wrong path, and the performance itself needs attention, the source. Before you reach for any type of parallel compression, eq, your better off going right back to your source. What is your "Time" doing? If your working in midi, is everything snapped to the grid? If it is, it probably is boring.
I would spend a day trying to reconstruct this groove. Analyze it, it doesn't need to be something you would release. But load the reference track into a session. Are you suffering from memory loss? What I mean by that is..... does your MEMORY of the songs impact not line up with reality? When you keep going back to the reference track inside of a session (after you've turned it down of course) You'll find that its not as big as you may remember it to be, and you'll get a stronger picture of what actually makes it work. Like, at 44 seconds, what makes that little kick fill work, and how that guitar in the left channel, probably a strat, starts playing the And A of every beat isn't very bright, but it doesnt actually Play the downbeat, shows that the arrangers/ producers, are leaving that part of the groove to the low end. Just like disco bass.
Once you've got a great performance, Here's a few things you can try:
Try compressing' processing your kick and bass, or any low end instruments in a low end buss (or aux track). If you've got kick, and a few bass instruments doing any sidechaining, try sending them all to the same buss before the master, and a little compression and eq goes a long way.
In fact, you may do this with midrange as well - why not (?) - rythmn guitars, keys. An Instrument Buss. I wouldnt add the snare to this one personally, but i wouldn't hesitate to sidechain from the snare.
Now you can have all of your instrument information support your lead information in 2 buss that can be eq'd and compressed around the drums and vocals.
Coffee buzz over.....