Thanks for the comments, Brent. Knife, I'll be finding time to listen to yours soon.

More info about me & my mix: I've been playing keys and singing in a band at church for some years now, and got into doing the live sound for us & some other groups. Our expert sound guy donated his DA7 when he upgraded his home studio a couple years back. The DA7 is how I originally discovered DA7.com a few years back, and re-discovered it / now audiotalkback recently.

For my day job, I'm a software engineer. Over time I've owned various midi sequencing programs and digital audio stuff, and my home studio's equipment list really upgraded when Behringer blew out the DDX3216, followed by a blowout on the emu1212. And I got a good deal on a pair of used SM58s when the same guy who gave us the DA7 upgraded his live rig to Betas.

However, I've collected all this stuff really meaning to do something with it, but asside from one Midi sequence I created and recorded into a PC soundcard years ago, the only recording I've done was on one day this past summer, 3 songs by the 3 piece band my son's in -- and they're 7th graders. If you start by lowering your standards appropriately, they don't sound *too* bad. :-)

As far as my mix goes, though: I recently bought a MacBook. So I thought I'd see what I could do in Garage Band; both the Mac and GB are new for me. Importing the tracks was a B*tch because the prorgram kept getting weird and locking up on each import; I ended up with the import/save/quit/restart/import next approach to finally get it done. But once everything was in there, there wasn't any further problems.

The acoustic guitar I compressed slightly, and left it with no effects. But the meat of the track sounded a bit empty, so I dup'd one channel of the guitar, delayed it by a bit (dragged the track to the right) and fed that through a chorus preset of some kind.

I added some reverb to the electric gutiar because I wanted to place it further back in the space. I was really pleased with the way that turned out. I did a bit of the same to the piano. That went ok, but what happened to the lead guitar was cooler.

I noticed there was some junk, between phrases, on the lead vocal track at around 2:48. So I figured out how to draw a volume automation curve.

That's about it besides tweaks to EQ here & there, and adusting the "master track" parameters.

Sibilance seems to be my achillies heel lately, both here and in live sound (another guy at church pointed some out to me recently). Perhaps partly because in mixing for church bands, the directors I've dealt with are pretty admant that the words being sung are heard and understood by the listeners, so consonants need to get through. Pointers on how to deal with it, both with only the tools in a DA7 (eq/comp/etc.) and with a full blown locker of outboard equipment / computer plugins, would be quite welcomed by me!

DAMN! sorry this is so long!