OK, here's what I did.
From the production standpoint:
First step was to bring all the faders up and see what this song had. Wow, lots of tracks and stuff going on.
I stripped down to lead vocal and what I thought were the foundation of the song. The acoustic guitar seemed the most sensible to me, it was slightly disappointing to only have the piezo pickup to work with, but you use what you have. I have the piano in there too.
The song is a bit long, so I wanted to build the instruments - as to not show the hand all at once. The way I think of it, once everyone is playing, where do you go from there?
I brought the kick and snare in during the first chorus, ala GNR 'take me down.." lol This is where most of the drum editing was done. I really didn't want to move everything around and effectively redo the drums. Most of the drums are intact. I did mute quite a few kick drum hits though.
I comp'd the electric guitar fills track from all four tracks supplied. Not all of these tracks had the same delay and ambience - I did my best to match them when necessary.
The bass and that electric guitar strat type part starting during the second verse.
I kept the background 'oohs' out until the second chorus. I also tried to clean up that edit on the end of the line "lost those funny things" What happened there? About the middle of the song, the strings come in to support the oohs. By the last time through the chorus, I used that synth chorus track which really had me thinking Melotron.
I didn't use the percussion stuff - I was thinking more Rock song. In fact, during my subsequent listens, I'd take out that 10 second section of the bell track I used during the intro.
On the technical side;
Mixed in N-track, all free plug ins with the exception of the mastering limiter.
That kick track has tons of click and I used quite a bit of compression to try and minimize it. By adjusting the attack time, you can often squash that initial transient of the click. Using that and EQ, I got the drum to sound more 'felt beater' ish. Lol
Snare drum has Blockfish set to slam, and tons of 80's reverb.
The rest of the drums have it's own reverb sound - a small room with some damping, trying to get it to sound like a kit in an actual room.
Acoustic guitar has lots of EQ dips, about 3 db - (from memory...400hz, 2k, and 5k) The goal there was to get it sounding less piezo like. I have a touch of chorus effect on it too.
Bass guitar has some mild compression. Also a small EQ bump, +2db @ 200hz
Lead guitar fills have -10db low shelf @ 250hz
Both the piano and electric rhythm guitar parts have a nice -6db dip around 500hz or so to make some room sonically for the vocal. Also a low shelf at around 200hz to clear room for the bass guitar and kick.
Melotron Choir and Strings have -6db low shelf @ about 400hz. Huge wide reverb.
Lead vocal has lots of De-essing. I treated the track in Samplitude to do some noise reduction before bringing it into N-track. I didn't use any compression on this because the part already has lots of compression before we got our hands on it. The backing vocals were a similar situation. Eq is typical Low shelf, somewhere around @150hz or so.
From what I recall, that's about it.
