You didn't give any bad impression! Your feedback is beyond appreciated, I'm just giving some insights and trying to have a chill discussion. your feedback was so well spoken that I might have replied a little to in depth and I apologize if I came off offended or defensive.
I would genuinely love to discuss your thoughts on the mentioned things.
Viewing post in Murdrum - Palindrome Jam Submission jam comments
😮💨 Glad I didn’t do you any discomfort.
As for your approach. It depends on how old the gear might be or through witch system you wanted to play through. Every Soundsystem has its own idiosyncrasies. Vinyl gets scratchy and has system wise a pretty steep cut in highs and bass and warbles in speed and pitch by quite a margin. Cassette looses its dynamics and some bandwidth, though mostly highs and flutters in short bursts. So maybe it’s best to work out how you wanna break it.
Overall, some Distortion in the mix bus, that is added in parallel might give some grit while not overdoing it. Maybe also adding a bit of Tape simulation or Vibrato could add something.
As for the positioning. If you want to be an ultra-stickler, you could have multiple instances of the same reverb. All but different in the pre delay. Reason is, that the sound merges more with the room the further back it is to mic or listener. So the more far the sound the lower the pre delay. Also, some instruments loos some fidelity in highs and lows. So having some high- and low-shelves cutting by a bit might add some Depth grading. Also having those reverb instances globally as an effect bus and every track having a separat send adds some cohesion.
Like I’ve said before, maybe adding a stereo widener might hinder the mix more that helping. Most widener destroy the stereo field or cut the mid in the stereo. The best advice I can give, is less is more. Also, it might help to watch the mix in different terms. Maybe the sound stage can be formed like a real stage (positioning instruments like on the stage) or in LCR (fully panned left, center or right, it was mostly used in the 70s) or Mid/Side (mono and stereo difference). Especially Mid/Side can add a lot of depth (like cutting the bass at 200Hz for the side mix to have it in the mono sum and have a fat sound).
I can defenetly relate on the heavy reverb use. I needed to somewhat wean my use of it a bit and learn to cut it a bit more. General rule of thumb nowadays is to mix it like I want it, and like said earlier EQ it, and the cut it by 3db further. Reverb can be a b**** to mix. Generally if you notice it it is most likely to much. But it’s right if you cant tell if it is on or not. If you the just bypass it, it is like magic and you will miss it. It could be also a problem with some headphones. I had some Audio-Technica R70x that were great but sucked every reverb tail, so I drowned everything. Nowadays I use some HiFi-Man Sundara, they are planar driver headphones, that are higher resolution and can recreate those tails. Also transients are more true to life.
I hope that might help somewhat. If necessary, I might need to add my Discord-account for some further nerdery ^^.