Crunchy Mastering
Alright, the very first thing that honestly... DID ruin the WHOLE thing for me is the fact that you took the path of the loudness war further than I've ever heard in my entire life. This means that your whole mix is too loud, and WAS clipping. Then all you may have done to fix it is put a compressor/limitter of some sort on the master track.
The first thing I would do is go back and re-do your mastering. Look at your db meter on your master track. I'll bet that it's almost constantly at 0db. Sure, it may be an extremely loud track, which might get the persons attention initially. But there are no dynamics to it. It needs to be bouncing up and down. It makes the whole thing sound weak. Your kick has no punch whatsoever. You need to have those dynamics in order for your track to have life. You should be able to look at your master db meter, and be able to REALLY see your levels pumping up and down when your kick is triggered. Unfortunately, there's no space for the kick to breathe in your dynamics.
Get into the habit of mixing quietly, then in the mastering stages making everything louder. Instead of mixing loudly, and making everything queiter in the mastering stages. This will help avoid this problem.
Alright, enough about the mastering.
The mix was put well together however. Probably the best I've heard from you... ever. Everything fits, all of the sound choices you went with compliment each other perfectly. I can tell you put a lot of effort into this track and had subjectivity with you the whole way throught the mixing process. I find that when I'm working on a song for a really long time, I tend to loose the ability to answer the question "Does this actually sound good or not?" but it appears as though you know what does, and does not sound good the whole way through the mixing process.
The sequencing was also done really well. I love the melody, VERY VERY catchy. Although the main riff (which was first heard in the piano flow loop) seems to be overused a bit and does get repetive near the end of the song, like when you brought it back at 1:38.
Anyways, aside from tearing apart your mastering, I don't have too much more criticism to offer. =]
8/10, 5/5 + downloaded and listened to on loop for nearly 45 minutes before deciding to write the review tonight lol :D
btw. look up a few terms if you have free time:
- Root Mean Square (abbreviated RMS)
- Dynamics in a mix
- Hard limitting (sometimes referred to as brick-wall limitting)
- Look up a video on youtube called "Loudness Wars"