Upon opening the session, the first thing I did was listen to the song fully a couple of times, and this gave me an idea of what I needed to fix, techniques I wanted to implement, and effects I wanted to add. I got straight to work by doing the heavy fixing, Comping Vocals, tuning them, time aligning some of the tracks to sit in the pocket better, and removing unwanted noise from certain tracks. Doing this allowed me to focus on the next task at hand, fader balancing, panning, and EQing. I concentrated on allowing all of the tracks to have their own space in the mix, whether in the stereo field or the frequency spectrum. I enjoyed the aspect of carving out space for the instruments to sit, relying on my ears to make decisions that allowed me to "open up" the mix. The next step was compression, leveling tracks, and adding character, contributed to the goal of making the song consistent. The main focus, however, was on the vocals as the vocalist was very dynamic, it gave me great practice on accurately dialing in Compression. Bus Compression was also an important factor in bringing the mix together. It was implemented on the Drum Bus and the Mix Bus, and doing this breathed more life into the track. The next process was applying Time-based effects, the mix at this point sounded great, but adding ear candy was a necessary step to grab the listener's attention. Adding techniques such as Delay Throws, Parallel Effects, and routing Delays to Reverbs were a few ways I was able to add variation to the mix. Each of these steps were equally important to achieve the Final Mix you can enjoy above.