After all the hemming and hawing and good discussion points made by many, I am starting to feel a bit better about my mixes. Even though I use a lot of real tracks, I think I am being held back a bit with my recording quality. I don't really strive for the best possible mic location (and plus the location will change from recording to recording), I record on a $50 mxl v63m condensor mic using a $29 art preamp in a basement room that has no treatment!

I think I might be doing as well as expected under those conditions. Now could I mix, EQ or compress better? -- absolutely. ... and I will continue to see what I can do. Over the past couple of days I have gone through 1/2 the songs looking for too much compression and went though all the tunes looking to where I could expand the dynamic range (DR) value.

They are not pro mixes by any stretch of the imagination, but they are holding up a bit better against some of my reference tunes. I don't know if I could learn and apply ozone in 10 days to feel comfortable using it so quick, so maybe I will go with what I got for this CD and on the next effort start over again. In the current songs, I need to fix a couple of vocal parts, re-do a ukulele part that is awful and fix a few other small parts hither and yon.

Thanks to everyone's comments, it has been most helpful.

Now at bandcamp: Crows Say Vee-Eh @ bandcamp or soundcloud: Kevin @ soundcloud