Nice song, and nice vocals!

But I agree there are issues with the mix. Just looking at the waveform, it looks like it's mixed so that everything is at maximum volume, all the time. That's typically done by throwing a compressor onto the final mix.

Apologies in advance for slipping into pedantic mode here...

A compressor basically keeps the volume between some given range. If the volume falls below a certain threshold, it turns the volume up, and if it goes above a threshold, it turns the volume down.

That's great when you've got an uneven volume coming in, and you want to "smooth over" the differences between the high and low volumes of a performance. So you can put a compressor on a vocal or bass line to get a consistent volume.

It's also helpful to throw on the final mix as a sort of "brick wall limiter", so that if the volume exceeds a certain point, the compressor keeps it within range, instead of giving nasty digital clipping. But when used as a limiter, the compressor only kicks it when the volume exceeds a limit - it's not used to raise the minimum volume.

It looks and sounds like you've thrown a compressor on the final mix to make everything louder. That will give you a sort of "wall of sound", but I don't think it matches the more folk feel of the music. And although "louder is better", it also creates ear fatigue, which makes it hard to listen to a song after a while.

In the final mix, the compressor will be applied indiscriminately. So when the bass comes in loudly, the compressor turns everything in the mix down... including the vocal. This leads to a sort of "pumping" effect, where you can hear the compressor adjusting the volume. You can hear it at 1:40 in your song.

Optimally, you want this effect to be completely transparent... Unless you're mixing a dance song, where the "pumping" is used as an effect.

But for most songs, you generally want the exact opposite to happen. Since the vocal is the most important part of the song, you want to make sure that it's never covered up by another instrument.

One way to ensure this is by using a compressor to apply "ducking", so that when a vocal comes in, it drive a compressor to lower the the volume on other instruments on the mix, so they don't step on the vocals. Check out this article for fun details, although I think it's not really necessary for this style of music.

But to reiterate the important point - nice song!

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?