There are a couple of other things I struggled with, and would be interested in how you both approached it.
Firstly the kick, I had to eq the crap out of it to get something useful. There is plenty of thump, but the attack sounded all wrong to me. I think we should have damped the drum more and maybe try a flam pad on it to get more attack.
You (almost) always have to EQ the crap out of a kick. I added 9db of low shelf at 50Hz, took away 15db at 800Hz with a narrow bandwidth, and added 10db of high shelf at 8kHz. Then I compressed it with a med attack and fast release at 3/1. It was also noise gated.
I also sent all the drum tracks to a group buss and compressed the crap out of them.
The overheads had a low shelf at 300Hz taken away and high shelf at 8k added. They were also compressed to death as well.
Secondly, I really struggled with getting the reverb right and still ended up with much less than either of your two mixes. If I pushed mine more the whole track just got washed out. I'm not too used to using reverb like this because I mainly do electronic music nowadays and tend to only use reverb for blend, relying more on delays. Any tips here?
I should have posted the track without the "mastering", There isn't as much reverb as it seems once the limiter gets to it.
In general, you want the reverb on the drums decay at some musically relevant rate. Meaning you want the reverb to last 1/4 note, half note, etc... so it helps push the groove along.
On vocals you want to chose a reverb that has a different tonality than the singers voice. That way, the voice still sticks out from it. I went a little overboard on the effects. I have a doubler (short delays), a plate reverb and a long delay on the vocal.
I only had reverb on the snare, toms and vocals. The drum verb was different than the vocal verb.
Also, any chance I could get your DAW projects? So I can see what you did? I can do Logic or Protools, or download reaper.
I'm using Nuendo and I use a lot of UAD plugins, so it won't be much help.
The main thing that help this mix out is panning two of the guitars wide and leaving the cleaner one in the middle. One of the guitars (audio12) has the worst guitar sound I've heard in a long time, so I EQed it to sound more like the other one. Then I sent all the guitars to a group buss and EQed and compressed them some more.
The bass was EQed and compressed to death too. I added 9db of 50Hz, 6db of 1kHz and 9db of high shelf at around 2kHz, then sent it through two compressors to smooth it out.
There are a lot of things working against you in this recording, most of them being the core sounds and the performance. The drums, however, sounded really good. You just can't rely on the overheads for the main sound of the kit because of your placement. The bass sounds really good too, it just doesn't work with the goofy guitar sounds they had.
The singer should have taken a couple more passes at the parts where his voice cracked and/or hit the bad notes. There is a mistake in the bridge on the audio12 guitar.
You just need to pan some stuff and don't be afraid of EQing too much or compressing.