hey, you might notice that i generally spend way less time than this responding to posts. i'm just pointing that out before i rant cause i generally think you guys have a lot of potential and if you focus on the songwriting at some point you'll probably have enough good material to hire a producer, like you mentioned.
so here i go again:
dude, your singer has a killer voice and now he sounds like he's staying at one distance from the mic for the whole song! the band sounds a bit tighter as well. this is progress! the drum sound is still very weak overall but that's a problem that is very hard to fix without the right room, some very expensive gear, and an engineer who enjoys the pain of dialing in a good drum sound. there are some guys around here (voxvender comes to mind) who get some pretty nice results with a handful of mics and a basement. maybe one of them will stop by. also, check out a guy named just william (velvet elvis is his handle i think). i don't know how he did it but he got a killer drum sound in a basement as well.
here's the good/bad news. that guitar in the end sounds great. i think you said your guitarist is also the singer so your production should mainly focus around him imo(hopefully he won't start to think the whole world is focused on him. lol.)
i think you will grab your listener a lot better if you start this song the way you ended it. start with that solo guitar, then introduce vocals for the first verse, then drums and bass during the first chorus, after the first chorus play a very sparse sax solo for like two bars then lay the sax WAY BACK in the mix while he's singing the next verse and so on......you see right now the sax is really fighting with the vocals and unforunately it's winning. it's not tat you are a bad player, it's just that i wanna hear the singer, not the sax. the sax should be almost unnoticable in the mix. not nonexistant, just more supportive than solo'd.
the family samples should occupy less of the song. we get the point so you only need like two bars of that. i mean geez, i thought you were gonna start introducing people. lol.
sounds like you tried some harmonies in the end too. that sounded pretty good. here's a trick that you can try with harmonies. some people like doing this some people don't. sing the harmony line twice and pan the tracks left and right, then compress the shit out of them. clears room for the main singer.
ok, that's all for now. i think you're moving in the right direction. i wish i could check out your band live but i'm not out east very often.
best of luck.
