Good ears, Jeff! Although some of the timing variability is due to swing, the part on the right was about 9 ms late on average. I fixed that but left the swing intact, and it works fine now. Thanks!
 
BTW I tried different keys and ones that related to the song's key worked the best. If I did something like A# for a song in A it didn't sound as good. Fifths weren't bad.

Anderton
 No one in their right mind would sit down with a calculator and pretend to do things that have musical relevance.

I graduated from the school in Boston in the early 80's, that you gave your seminar at, and learned just how much mathematics does come into play in composition.  What amazed me even more was that somebody would have the ears to hear something so mathematically complex, but presented musically.  A lot of classical music illustrates that as well.

Anderton
If I did something like A# for a song in A it didn't sound as good. Fifths weren't bad.

I also happen to be a banjo picker...and tuning the head to a 1/2 step away [up to G#] or more (to the open G, the banjo is usually tuned to), seems to almost always produce the best sounding instruments, when other items are optimally setup too.  That may seem odd initially, but in this case, it is almost *truth*. It also keeps things from sympathetically vibrating and produces a more even, consistent tone thru out the note range.

Btw, the phase-y/comb filtered percussion sound, to me is an instance where it actually sounds worse when solo'd, but I imagine in the mx, is an improvement.
 
So...I guess nothing said, really relating to your post actually !!  ;-D

Craig,
 
Interesting that you used the delay technique.  You may be aware that this technique was used frequently back in the day in the studio (some very famous records have this technique employed).  They did it a bit differently and it involved two VARI SPEED tape decks.  I know that this has a scientific name of some psycho acoustic (the name I could not tell you) effect but in order to pull this off, you would make a physical loop of tape (about 15 to 30 feet) and route it around the control room (sort of like a giant ECHO PLEX cartridge). The reason for the large loop was so you could just turn this on during mixing and not have to worry about the decks running out of tape from a reel.
 
Turn the tape decks (giant echoplex with great audio) on, and then send tracks into this delayed loop buss and use the varispeed to find the sweet spot (the speed of the tape determined the amount of delay between the record and repro heads).
 
Difference was that almost everything would do through these tape loops (each of them set to different delay times), the returns would go to a DELAY RETURN channel and then to the reverb buss pre fader (the faders for the returns would stay off) so that the only audio  from this loop would be sent to the reverb buss (in essence, the delayed signal would only be heard through the reverb buss).
 
This then created a magical sense of space and much against one's common sense, more clarity in the mix.  The difference was that the delays were set to the tempo of the song as to mask its effect under other tracks that were more prominent in the mix.
 
Jim
 
PS - we did this by ear and not science and I still use this technique in almost all projects I work on but instead of 2 reel to reels, I use 2 instances of echo boy on tape sim mode and use the sync to tempo for the delay time (usually 1/32 and 1/16 notes) with the 2 delays panned hard right and hard left to the stereo reverb buss.

Very interesting, thank you. I used varispeed a lot "back in the day," but never as you described with reverb. So if I understand you correctly, translating this technique to what I described, you're basically "tuning" the signal going to the master reverb that is affecting multiple tracks?

If I use your metaphor, yes, except that one used their ears to determine the length of the delays.  And then the reverb buss fader would create more or less AIR and SPACE on the mix depending on taste.  Sometimes you can hear a bit of the delays when their were beat pauses on the main tracks.  I can DEMO this for you with a WEB BASED stem mixer I have on my site if interested (let's you play with the volumes).  The reverb stem has the results of this technique and you can play around with its volume and the volume of the main stems.  Let me know and I will give you a link to check it out.
 
Jim