Mix Challenge

First, after import I normalized all tracks to peak at -18dB (I know I'm doing it wrong lol, but I dunno what's the correct unit of measurement -18dB RMS? integrated? LUFS???) to keep my gain staging somewhat in check. Then I went on to the vocals tho I really shouldn't have lol. They didn't need much work btw, mostly compression and slight eq to fit in with the other tracks, but only after having dealt with the other tracks. Messed up my workflow is what I did.
Next I went to tweak the levels and panning on the synth tracks, all 8 of them, and I played around with all sorts of pan and volume automation on each. I also brightened up pretty much all of them intuitively but I had to bring it down a lil when I compared it to the original mixes, and later in the mix process I automated filtering on some tracks also doing volume automation.
I then went to the bass, i.e. 808 (wow, I really went in my reverse order somehow today, lol) and I compared it with the original and second mix that Mellow Browne graciously gave us to reference. I didn't like what I was getting it to sound like, completely different basically from what Mellow got in his revised mix but I moved on.
I played around with compression and saturation and eq on the 808 but I had to move on quickly and just hope for the best. I then set levels and panning for the drum elements, used Rhodes V-Pan for the closed hihat to autopan it, no other processing, open hat got eq and filtering to make it more mellow sounding.
Next I moved on to the snares and kick, snares got some eq brightening, tried to use compression but I just couldn't hear it all too well (with the bg noise in my space today) so I opted for a simple transient designer to bring up the punch on the clap but snare actually got some compression to bring out the transient. Kick was a beauty, I didn't have to do too much, just a classic kick carving eq job, some very gentle optical style compression with a distressor emulation and into a bus with FreeClip (Venn Audio) to help me get more saturation.
Then I had to play around with the kick and 808 relationship so I enabled the sidechain compression that's already in my template to duck the 808 ever so slightly, just 2 or so dB, to keep it out of the way of the kick. I had to play around with them a little longer than I wanted to because I hadn't taken into account how they were behaving in their bus together (the B bus in Michael Brauer's terms lol) so when I saw what the compressor was doing I was like: What!?, so I went and fixed them up to fit nicely. But when I compared them with the original mixes, they still fell flat, so I had to tweak their eq too on the bus, just boosted 40Hz some 4dB and that was that lol.

Next I went back and forth between working on vocals and setting appropriate levels on everything, Processed the Hooks together with the same processing, used mostly the same processing on the verse vocals as well, then I recreated the Autotune vocal line with MAutoPitch and processed it the same as the other's basically, but in my template I have all my vocals going into some plate reverb so this part seems more washy than the original, I dunno if that's better or not, but I only noticed it on final render and comparison with the original, that it got more reverb on it.

Basically a lot of elements got reverb and some got delays as well. For example, the pistol fx got a touch of washy delay, the FX fx got some delay as well, some synths now have reverb on them as well, pretty audible too, just I don't think it's too much, I can imagine a trap song with a lot of reverb lol so I mixed it that way lol.

The adlibs got delays too, the ads delay throws mostly, and one delay automated whoop in the ads track. The rest of the vocals also got some tape slap delay as well.

The final few hours of the mixing process I spent in automating mostly everything lol, I played with the panning of most synths, and most adlibs, and I finally dealt with the transition (and ending) that we were allowed to play with for this mix.
I went into the synth and instruments' bus (bus A) and added two instances of Filter MS-20 by Arturia and found two presets I really liked and mashed them together, tweaked some paramaters and bam, that was half of the transition sound, because I also found a preset in Waves' MetaFilter that gave me that pumping stuttering effect that was almost the same as the one in the original mixes, but the original is more rhythmically playful, mine is straightforward (timecrunch!) but I made the three plugins play together to make a somewhat more interesting transition than simply using one or the others, so I automated them to go from the couple Filter MS20's into the MetaFilter.
I then remembered that Mellow Browne also did some filtering or something on the drum elements in some places so of course I had to replicate that, but not with filtering, but with Phasing! I used a preset in PhaseMistress (Soundtoys) called Anti-Phase and it gave me what I wanted to hear the most out of all the other presets I heard so I went with it lol.

Anyway, I am getting to the end now, I volume automated everything once more because in comparing the original to my mixes I heard my clap was weak and inaudible at times, so I played with some fader levels until I got everything balanced as it is in the reference.

There, that's about it, mostly. I hope I didn't ruin the song with my mix, I really need to reset my hearing and listen again with fresh ears tomorrow, that is, today (it's Christmas already! Yay!). So when I do, I will get a better idea of how my mix actually compares to the original references, but in my opinion (as valid as it is rn) I think I managed to put together a pretty decent mix!