Then maybe your mixes are too wet? One thing you should notice about most modern production is that it is relatively dry and in your face. There are no big reverberant snares, echoy vocals-cals-cals, and the like, although reverb and delay are still being used.
I personally think tape delay has a unique sound to itself which is wonderful... as to whether it is superior to digital delay? I have to disagree because you can do so many k3wl
p 
) things with some digital delays (I already mentioned a few in an earlier post) and that have their own unique and wonderful sound that are simply not possible with tape.
I don't double mic guitar cabs too often, mainly 'cuz I always end up liking one of the mics/tracks way more than the other...
That way...I don't need to mess with EQ to make them sound different since they do on their own, and because they are two different performances, I get less phasing issues.
I can pan them any way I like...even hard L/R...and there's no need to add delay to "separate" them like you would with a split/doubled track.
Or...if it works for the song...I will track the same rhythm guitar part a second time using an acoustic guitar, which can sound really nice against the electric if you pan them apart.
I'm really wondering whether "autotune on everything" is just an extended fad or whether it's going to stay with pop music for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't put my money on either - the general public doesn't seem to mind (if they notice it at all, the subtler stuff I mean), and like I mentioned in another thread, it's affecting even those of us who don't like it. I have definitely become more perceptive of the lack of autotune records, not necessarily because they're poorly sung but because autotune just has a sound to it that has nothing to do with pitch correction (well, combined with ever-increasing amounts of compression, saturation, layering etc). And I have to say that I sometimes find myself wishing that the vocal was fatter because some material would simply work better if that was the case.
I don't think so, I think it's in the arrangement. But you be the judge - here's the last one I did (I hope it's not in bad taste posting links to songs here). It's not all that wet I think, but I seem to be trailing Depeche Mode by about 15 years for one reason or another ...Then maybe your mixes are too wet? One thing you should notice about most modern production is that it is relatively dry and in your face. There are no big reverberant snares, echoy vocals-cals-cals, and the like, although reverb and delay are still being used.
Like I said, it's a like an audio cocktail, it works together with all the other processing, but something tells me that the element of the vocals being dead in tune is very important for the combined impact of the vocal arrangement. It's difficult to explain it, different people may perceive differently, but for me, it makes everything feel so very uncompromising, and I like that in a vocal.
But wouldn't that result in phase cancellations and therefore uneven level (nothing really hard compression couldn't cure to an extent I suppose, but why even go there), as well as other nasty things that you really don't want going on in the bass region? I may be off here but every audio engineer I've ever learnt from advised me to leave the bass well alone.
Likely more due to the line between additional information down there being interesting or effective and a 'mooshy mooshy situation is quite a bit less forgiving.