Thanks for the feedback, guys. Above all, I still feel like I'm most unhappy with the basic guitar tone. It's not terrible, but...I just should have tweaked the amp settings a little more. A little less gain and a little more mids probably would have cleared it up a lot.
The vocals thing... As for the clean vocals, it's just on an aux send to a stereo delay, no other effects, and I agree that it wouldn't hurt to bring that send down just a little bit. And for the other, double tracked/panned vocals, I also can see that there is room for some more tweaking with volume automation. The doubled/panned stuff was brought down 3dB from the center/single tracked stuff, maybe a little more down would be good. I seem to remember being told once, that when something is panned center, and then is panned hard left for example, the left speaker then is playing that sound 3dB louder than it was when the element was panned center. Does anyone know for sure it that's correct? I just figured that doubling/hard panning something and dropping it 3dB would be the volume equivalent...and of course it sounded pretty good to me, as well.
And the snare... It was tediously replaced 100% with samples of the same velocity as my drummer played, from a band's snare I recorded previously. I just can't stand working with bleed in the snare mic. There was tape on the top head to kill a lot of of the offensive ringing. Audix i5, aimed at the middle, at about a 30 degree angle. I had about 20 different velocities to work with, most of which were used. I picked my favorite "hard" sample and used it as kind of the "main" snare sound. I used about three EQs to get it to sit just right- one for taking out about 10 or so little notches of nasty ringing tones (the smallest Q setting that the Q10 will give you), and then the other two for more broad EQ sculpting. With both the kick and the snare, I've found it helpful to use a few EQs on top of each other, just so I can meticulously tweak things to fine detail. There's only so much you can do with just one EQ. Then it was compressed quite heavily with a C1, to get that "smack".
The mix was also mastered by me, with a C4, a linear phase EQ, and then through my T.C. Electronic Finalizer. I think the snare and kick definitely benefited from the Finalizer, as far as tightness and punch goes.
