Glad to be part of the competition, with such a nicely arranged song.
Without further ado, here is my entry:
https://samply.app/p/y4N02yWwqC5DH7qWVmbS
Download (under the three dots in line with the file name) is the lossless WAV, streaming can be lossy but it can be set up by clicking audio options in the middle.
First and foremost, details about the monitoring, as they were specifically requested:
my room is untreated and very unfortunate in nature when it comes to acoustics (concrete walls as my studio is in a block of flats, cube-shaped room, not enough space to move my setup), so as a mastering and mixing engineer, my only safe bet was to invest in headphones and simulated environments. Thus the bulk of mixing was done on Beyerdynamic 990 Pro 250 Ohm open-back headphones. Bass and kick separation and other crucial tasks were carried out "dry" but during balancing and adding in the other parts, the Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 plugin was utilized. At the closing stage of the process, I switched over to ADAM Audio's H200 closed-back headphones alongside the ADAM Audio x Sonnox Headphone Utility plugin which was used in externalization (for speaker simulation).
Some highlights of the process:
Since the song was quite epically sweeping and dramatic in theme, I decided I would be braver with effects, which you can hear especially in the choruses where the vocals are sent through a lush atmospheric setting of a Lexicon 224 to give it an elevated space whereas the singing in the verses have a smaller space setting. As quick as the chorus came together, I spent quite some time tinkering with mixing the verse vocals which in the end screamed for their own long reverb tail.
Another thinker was the piano in the last segment which sounded a little bit too dull for my ears dry. Since the arrangement did not really grant it much - it was not played with two hands in multiple different registers, for example - I decided it needed some harmonic frequencies to sound more organic, I added a Waves Abbey Road Saturator into the chain there.
Did some analyzation of the final mix as well which I am sharing here (autodeletes in 3 weeks):
