Learning to Mix- Any advice/tips?

[Pickasso]

Venom Crawl
This is a test mix, something that was made up on the spot, for testing. (not an actual song) The drums & guitar were recorded live, then later the guitars & bass were re-recorded. Hoping to get this sounding great, then move on to a real song.

So, we used 8 mics on the drums; 2 x overheads l/r, snare top, snare bottom, Kick, Hi hat (muted in the mix), 2 x toms l/r.

Guitars are recorded direct, the fx chain is greengate/TSE X50, Lecab2/ReaEq

Bass- not much, just compression & Boogex with a Hiwatt impulse.

The tom tracks are gated to reduce the instrument bleed-over. The Kick drum is heavily compressed on the first riff (12:1 with fast release), 2nd riff it's turned off. Everything was recorded & mixed in Reaper.
This was a test where I sent every track to the same ambience reverb.

What can I do to improve?

2nd try: VENOM CRAWL 2

 

[Wishx]

EQ

 

[oroinvictus]

EQ

Wow, how helpful.

The drums are pretty raw and could us some compression and 'verb to get them wide and punchy. The guitars are lacking in mids and have a lot of unnecessary low-mids and low-end going on, and I can't hear a bass track.

 

[KHE]

What can I do to improve?

the playing (timing). more important than everything elese. shit in shit out. simple

 

[jackbraglia]

I'm not sure where to begin with this. Did you do anything other than set your levels? Like ANY processing at all? Everything sounds very dark and rumbly. Make sure every track has compression, then start to EQ, especially the guitars, roll-off at about 40-80hz depending on how much bass you want in your guitar tone, boost at around 1.6khz, and do a hi shelf starting at like 3.2-3.6khz to really brighten that guitar tone up. The snare needs more verb, the overheads need more hi's, kick needs more compression and hi's ......that's just a start though.

 

[Pickasso]

Cool. Thanks for listening & for the advice/tips. Some of it is surprising, but that's the reason I posted it, to get some alternate opinions. I think I will start completely over from scratch & repost a new mix when it sounds decent, working in some of the tips.

the playing (timing). more important than everything elese. shit in shit out. simple

I'm not too worried about the playing. It's good enough for a test riff. I hear what you're saying though.

Here's a question:
What's the best method for using reverb in a mix? Use it as one verb sound that all the instruments get sent to (ambience)? Or have a verb sound for each separate instrument (whatever sounds good for that instrument)?

 

[Pickasso]

OK, so I started over, did some changes to everything. Guitars went from using 6 impulses in Lecab 2 to just one using Reaverb, that helped with the low mids mentioned. Tried to make the bass guitar more audible as well:

VENOM CRAWL 2