Alan,
It's a wonderful song. Now, here is my take on it.

1. Three instruments, all apparently lined up directly in front of you on the stage. I know that you've been buying backing tracks, but I don't think this one was. I could be wrong. Move the backing guitar off to the right, and move the strings to the left. Use the pan controls for each track, and set it to 64 for each, as a place to start. It fills out the soundstage, and allows you to 'see' the instruments. In a mix, now, I've taken to wearing a pair of headphones, closing my eyes, and pointing to where the instrument is. Then, I remove the headphones, use the speakers, and point again to make sure they're in about the same place.

2. Overall volume. The file, when you were finished was about -12dBFS at it's peak. That means that you've lost about 10dB of dynamic range, which is especially critical if you're playing a soft, lightly instrumented song, because it's possible to hear the noise floor in certain passages. By the way, I did not in this case, but I'm just saying as an FYI. All the tracks should be be recorded at or near 0dB to utilize the full dynamic range of the track. Once you do that, you may have to pull down the individual volume control for the track to fit it in the mix, but that's what the sliders are there for.

3. In this case, I would have put the file in something like Audition, or Audacity, or, even one track in Sonar, and used the 'Normalize' feature. That would bring out the file to a full volume, even though it would have raised the noise floor, but you wouldn't have had 12dB that was missing off the top.

As always, playing was brilliant, and the song was wonderful. Can you tell me if you used a backing track for it, or did you record the strings and guitar yourself?

Respects,

Gary

I'm blessed watching God do what He does best. I've had a few rough years, and I'm still not back to where I want to be, but I'm on the way and things are looking far better now than what they were!