My bad, I said cowbell; meant to say ride bell. Anyways...
Of course, I'm perfectly fine with you doing this how you want... as long as it has direction, which is what I'm mostly emphasizing here. Every song has SOME sort of progression, no matter how stagnant it seems, and for me, this felt like it just gets to the solo parts, then the lead tells me to go back and forth between "let's keep going" and "no... wait... I gotta do something first, and then we gotta go back to where we started. One moment. ... Okay, NOW let's go back". What I think you wanted was for the lead to say, "okay, focus on me for now, and I'm gonna jam out while you bob your head" and then say, "alright, ready? We're going to move on... right... now."
By randomly placed, I mean that it sounds as if you suddenly said to yourself, in the middle of writing out the melody, "ooh, what would happen if I just did this right now?", but at an inopportune time in the partwriting. I'm not referring to the rhythmic error, but the randomness of why they were executed in that way in that spot in this remix. It's like someone talking normally for about five seconds, and then suddenly acting weird and yelling incessantly for about 5 seconds, and calming down in the next five seconds or something. That's the 'randomness' I'm hearing. I like groove too, but I honestly don't feel grooved here each time the lead does those wild pitch bends.
Well, I'm hearing it for sure; I try to treat my observations with uncertainty, usually. For example, a tabla might sound like a conga. But this time there's nothing for me to be uncertain about. What headphones are you using? Try looking it up on http://www.headphone.com/pages/build-a-graph and posting the result. I have a feeling your headphones are low on bass response. If you wanted to know, these are the ones I was using when writing that previous post.http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCompare.php?graphType=0&graphID[]=963&scale=30
I used to analyze waveforms to guess how the balance was, saying bass waveforms are lower frequency and treble wave forms are higher frequency, but I wouldn't put too much stock into that. You can have a completely squashed waveform railing at 0 dB that sounds terrible because the whole song volume was raised until it got to that point (and possibly past that), and you can have a loud waveform railing at 0 dB due to good compression that sounds just right. I'm not saying forget about waveforms, but I don't think you should assume that just because it looks like what you have seen as good, that it actually sounds close to that. Use your ears more, rather than your eyes for this. (Railing in this case means pushing up against 0 dB for a long time) ...What? What is a "track queue"? A regular "queue" is an abstract data type, like a restaurant reservation, or a "please hold" wait-in-line type of deal. Also, hard limiting cuts off the transients (for example, the loudest spike in a kick drum), so if you do that excessively, it can create a small static noise, which I don't think you would want. I would lower the volume of all the drums by about 2 dB, then apply some master compression sometime later so that everything gets raised somewhat evenly towards 0 dB and volumes are evened out a little more. If you DO do this, I would also suggest that you do not do any edits while the compressor is on, but turn the compressor off if you have more edits to do; the compression, if you do it, I would recommend you do last, so what you do to the mixing IS what you should hear.