WARNING: The following post is mostly just blathering and personal thoughts about... uh... life, stuff, things, poop. Nothing particularly technical or interesting. ;-)
Hi, Danny. Sorry I didn't get the finished version up before you stumbled upon the the bass heavy mix. I was hoping to avoid wasting your time with that but I guess in a way it's good because you heard the boominess/excessive low end too which means I'm not crazy.
With the stripped out mids I'm not quite sure what the issue is. It could be one of many things or a combination of things. My first thought is maybe it's the master EQ again. To me the premaster sounded a little hairy and kind of harsh throughout the mid range but after running it through the BT Pultec plug and fiddling with it I found it to be more under control and smooth. I a/b it a LOT with the unfiltered version and two other eq'd versions I came up with and the original settings I had from last time (the ultra bassy one) seemed to be the right one. So much so that one of the alternate eq settings I dialed in blind ended up almost exactly the same as the original settings when I compared the two.
However I suspect there may be some darker and more complicated demons at work here. One being the absolute lack of equipment used while recording this. I know a good tech with a good sim and a good toolset should be able to work with almost any signal but I don't think I'm that good yet and the only high quality tools I have came with Sonar. Everything else is kind of middle of the road or crap. The guitars and bass were all direct line in to the interface and while the Scarlett does have a nice input signal it's still just line in. Next go around I'm going to try some different setups involving the XLR outputs on my Line 6 head (which is still pretty crummy but it gives a much better clean tone base signal compared to straight line in), my old US Mackie mixer (nice pres and I can give the signal some body with the eq section and perhaps some bite with the trim) and trying out micing some of my actual amps which unfortunately are all transister but should give some more throw. Speaking of throw I've already started learning a lot more about TH2 and traditional guitar mic setups which translate VERY well to the cab section of the sim. With this tone I just kind of left the cab alone because... well I was quite sure what the heck it all meant, lol. I also have the full version now with some much nicer models and and better FX. I could have swapped all that out while remixing this but I wanted to treat it as though someone had sent me printed material to work with (which is why I bounced the drums to audio too). I basically tied my own hands for the sake of FORCING myself to take something crummy and making it acceptable because with the types of artists I'll probably end up working with that's exactly how things will go down. Dudes with some kind of multitracker in their basement sending me their stuff because they can't afford anyone else... lol. Basically demos and sh*t to start with. I actually have a huge backlog of that kind of stuff of my own bands here too that I have to put together eventually... but I'm getting a little off track there. Point is I really need to work on getting my input signals sounding better so I'm not straining to just get things sounding acceptable. It's definitely going to be an uphill battle because my mics are low grade/wrong kind, I don't have proper splitters for stuff, I don't have any fancy tube preamps or rack gear to condition my input signals, my one good guitar amp is an ancient transistor amp that is indeed quite nice but it's certainly not very versatile and there's just something... I don't know, kind of flat/weird about it... it's really hard to dial in to EXACTLY what I want. I have a couple little practice amps I might play around with but again transistor stuff and they're kind of cheapos with limited outputs. Even my guitars are kind of hard to work with for my style and they have some mechanical issues as well.
Now these aren't excuses and it certainly doesn't deter me like... at ALL because I am OBSESSED with this stuff now. It just means I'm going to have to get super creative for a while with what I've got until some cash starts flowing in again from somewhere. Sure it's a pain but I don't think I'd learn as much as a guy who starts out with all sorts of fancy gear at his disposal. I've seen dudes like that flat out refuse to even make an attempt saying it's "impossible!"... but nothing in this realm, IMO, is impossible. There may be compromises here or there and maybe certain stuff won't win any engineering awards but as I mentioned earlier some of my favorite recordings are crummy old demos and live stuff.
I aspire to be the ultimate turd polisher. Right now I'm more of a turd buffer or perhaps more aptly, assistant to the turd buffer's secretary. ;-p
Despite all that you know I aspire to great things and certainly don't accept "good enough" as something to aspire to and I think maybe that's why you and so many others here have taken so much time out for me and put up with my severe lack of education and plethora of eccentricities. In this case though I think just hearing you say that even for a "bedroom demo" that this is "good enough" is an achievement. It's time to move on, put some of those other plans I mentioned into practice and move forward. This turd is as polished as it's going to get for now without somehow pooping it out from scratch again (sorry... guess that's gross but the analogy was already in play.... lol).
Now it's about minimizing compromises. I know the program, I know the tools, I have a rough idea of the techniques so now it's a matter of using all that to get what's in my head out and on to tape. A good example of a compromise in this sense is that area you mentioned from 1:20-1:37. What I was hearing in my head was the solo being all ethereal with a phaser/chorus with the backing tracks remaining relatively untouched. Like the guitar was floating around disparate and scattered through space and then when the fast solos kick in it all comes slamming together into an ultra fine point like BAM! What ended up happening is I put the bloody phaser on and for some reason it completely washed out all the backing tracks and it sounded like ass... but I HAD to get that phaser part out of my head. So I dicked around and dicked around until I had that solo cloned and panned left/right slightly and at one point had a send going to a center panned bus (not sure if I took that out, put the phaser on one side and set it extremely low. It sucked. You can barely hear the phaser effect but it still kind of screws up the backing tracks. If I tried to push the phaser any farther it just turned into a mess. So, yeah... a severe compromise from what I was envisioning and what I could do in the real world.
And that's actually a theme throughout this and pretty much anything I've ever recorded. I've got all these great ideas in my head but I just don't have the experience or know how to do it so I try to find an acceptable middle ground. If I were sitting in your studio I could probably tell you what I'm hearing and you'd probably have it pumping out of the speakers within a few minutes. THAT is what I want to be able to do and although there were still a lot of compromises made here there were far less and when I wanted to try to get something out of my head I was just sitting there scratching my head. I knew what tool to use and where to start fiddling which is an ENORMOUS improvement than the old "twist things until it makes the noise gooderer" days.
Anyway, that's a whole lot of hot air to just say "I'm just gonna keep trying". Guess I'm just getting my own thoughts focused on what's next because there is going to be a LOT of trial and error in the coming months especially now that there is a whole new set of tools with X3 and the fact I actually have enough room to start using some of my hardware.
Also now that this is done I should start reintroducing some daily theory studies again so I should be able to get some more of that other stuff off to you.
Thanks again, Danny. I owe ya.
And again thanks to everyone else. No more re re re re re re mixes on this (lol). This one's going in the vault.
Cheers.