I'm glad you enjoyed the mix, and I am happy to wait for some new vocals and then make other adjustments to the current mix. I would be happy to discuss the various decisions that I made.
1. The first thing I did, that any engineer needs to do, is organize the tracks. You had labeled the files really well which helped. I went through and color coded everything according to my personal color scheme and set up a handful of buses that I almost always use (drum/percussion bus, acoustic guitar bus, electric guitar bus, vocal bus).
2. I listened to the song with the faders all at 0 a few times and start pulling things down and pushing things up to get a general balance.
3. I realized quickly that you had double tracked almost everything, so my first decisions were based on which instruments I thought needed to be spread wide and which ones I wanted to use mono, placed throughout the stereo field. I muted a bunch of tracks that I didn't think needed double tracking. I started panning loosely and continue the panning adjustments throughout the entire process as the mix starts to take shape.
4. First processing decisions were made on the percussion since it was the backbone of the song. The cajun needed more thump and punch, which I achieved with a combination of EQ sculpting and saturation. I HPF around 24hz to clean up the rumbly stuff, scooped out the mids quite a lot to remove boxiness, gave a tight boost around 80hz for thump, a tight boost around 2khz for punch, and LPF off everything above 7k. I gave a decent amount of "warm tube emulation" saturation via my favorite FabFilter Saturn, and EQed the saturation as well - boosted the lows, cut some mids, and added presence. Photos:
5. Worked to get the bass driving with the cajun. Huge scoop out of the mids, tight boost at 1khz for finger noise to cut through the mix, and a cut at 80hz which is the same frequency I boosted the cajun. That gives the cajun a spot to thump without the bass getting in the way, so the two can work together. Bass was really well recorded, so only light compression doing 1-2db of reduction was necessary for dynamic range control.
6. Vocals now, the next most important part of the song after percussion/bass. HPF up to 136hz to clean up all the low end junk that pop vocals definitely don't need, took out a little mud at 580hz, boosted around 2.4khz to give some presence and cut through the busy mix. The compression took some playing around. My first thought, which ended up being the best one, was parallel compression to help the vocals cut without squashing them to hell. So I squashed them with a 3.5:1 ratio doing between 4 and 8db of reduction, but only mixed that signal in about 30% with the original. Then I used a Waves C1 to tame the peaks by 1-3db for dynamic range control.
6. Guitars. So, so many guitars. This took the longest because there were just so many acoustic and electric guitars all competing, plus they were all double tracked. Acoustics were given basic EQ treatment: HPF up to 150hz, dips around 500-600hz to give the vocals some room, boosts around 3khz for presence. Gave the entire acoustic bus a mild overdrive/saturation for some grit, via IVGI plugin (free, I believe). All electric guitars were HPF between 150 and 240hz, no other treatment. Well recorded.
7. Back to background vocals now. Bus had EQ (HPF way up to 340hz and a dip in the harshness range to avoid buildup of sibilance, some analog emulation presence boosting and air via Waves VEQ3, and slamming analog emulation compression with Waves VComp.
8. Reverb/delay choosing. Now that the whole mix was falling into place I wanted to choose an appropriate reverb to glue everything together. My go-to is room reverb and I went with a medium size room, about 3 sec of delay time and 45ms of pre-delay to put everything a little bit away from the imaginary walls. Then every track that needed reverb got sends in varying amounts according to what their place in the song was. Most everything was given minimal send because the mix was already so busy. EQed the reverb to take some of the mids out so we don't get muddy reverb. Then chose a delay just for the solo acoustic guitar, and used Waves H-Delay.
9. Timing and pitch issues. Went through with Melodyne and tightened the timing of the entire introduction and also the various cajun fills throughout the song. Used Melodyne to fix the most egregious pitch errors in the vocals, but suspected you would be re-tracking the vocals so didn't waste hours on it.
10. Replacement. No matter how hard I tried, the crash cymbal sounded like s***. No EQing, no matter how drastic or subtle, and no reverb would give me the sound I wanted. So I finally gave up and replaced it with a MIDI crash cymbal that needed no treatment.
11. Slapped on my favorite mix bus compressor doing a max of 2db reduction with slow attack and long release times to tighten things up. Then ran everything through FabFilter Pro-L limiter just to bring the mix up to a reasonable listening volume for posting on a forum (the song is only hitting a max of .5 of reduction - it's just acting as a safety net, not a limiter).
Aaaaaand that's where we're at. It all took about 2 hours to get to that point. I think it's in decent shape for more precise work.
Thanks for your feedback!