SO I have been working forever on this song and have had some really amazing help along the way. The song is almost complete now and I would really appreciate some critique. Bare in mind that the track will have vocals on it.

nice tune! i'm not huge into prog rock, though i can certainly appreciate it, so take my feedback with a grain of salt (as always!). The playing is top notch. I especially like how tight the bass and drums play together with a lot of interesting guitar lines woven in. The composition has a lot of depth too, which i like. I especially like the layers of different textures used with the synth in there. I'd be curious to hear this piece w/vox. Production-wise, the recording could definitely use mastering - though I'm sure you know this as you're not yet finished. To my ears, the drums are slightly over-compressed when compared to the other instruments in the mix. This could be a taste thing, but if you could ease the compression threshold, that might help the recording to my ears. Side note: something sounds odd about the drums around 3:45 & 5:20 - is that a floor tom that's too hot in the mix in the right channel? At times, I find the guitars to be a tad too quiet - especially during the bigger distorted parts. To my ears, there should be a bigger sound there w/more presence. The guitars also seem to be a bit washed out during those parts - maybe that's the issue for me? Is it too late to tweak the presence and/or distortion settings? I take it you recorded the guitars live correct? What kind of mics did you use? A lot of these things could likely be worked out during the mastering process, so it's hard to tell how much you'd want to do before that. Just mastering what you have here might make a world of difference. anyhow, just a few ideas/thoughts. thanks for sharing!!

Thanks a lot for you critique this was great and a lot to think about. The drums were really hard to get right, they are not perfect but the way they were recorded was quite bad and it took a lot of work to get them to just sound kinda normal so there is nothing we can do with the drums unfortunately. The thing I have an issue with is that I think the one of the guitar parts on the first chorus sounds to over powering. Do you hear that?