Hi, all:

Spent the past week or so working on this "interpretation" of the song "Dirty Paws" by Of Monsters and Men. The parts don't match up 100% but that's alright in my book, however, I can't figure out what it is in the mixing that separates a recording like this to the top-40 produced track. Any advice / critique are appreciated. (La la la's need to be re-done, I know that much).

A drummer is tracking the percussion as we speak, so one less problem.

Thanks.

I'm not familiar with this song, but that's not a bad thing, as I'll judge it as I hear it.
Love the vocals, that's the most important part of any vocal song, that's what most people will be listening to.
I like that you paned them, normally the pan would be closer.
Bass Drum And Bass guitar are too heavy in the mix draining all the overall power in the sound - you could try and put a high pass filter through them, but it may change the quality of the tone.  It's always best to try and get in as right as possible in the raw recording, that way you will still get an authentic nice tone.
I assume you DI'd the acoustic guitar, that's how it sounds to me. You get a nicer tone micing it up with a pencil condenser.  Yeah it's super clean, but it's all about the sound and feel.

So yeah comparing this to say a recording from an established quality recording studio. OK so they may be able to get it to sound better, but it's no substitute for the quality of an artists performance and the quality of the song. Put it this way would your rather hear a quality song from a quality artist recorded on basic recording equipment or an average or even boring song from a dull artist recorded in the best recording studio with the best recording engineers?

We can all very easily blame our performance on our recording equipment.

Interestingly enough out of all my 150 songs+ here on the AMP. the one that is most popular was recorded on a basic Yamaha Tape 4 track, recorded in one take, no compression and just a little reverb.

This is a really nice piece of work.  I'm not able to offer much by way of advice, I'm afraid, although I did feel like the vocals were just a handful of milliseconds late throughout most of the song.  The loose timing works great as it is, but in just a few places where words that were meant to fall on the beat, they'd break through a little after the drum or guitar beat.

It's probably just a matter of preference, since I know I've heard a number of albums done like this deliberately (e.g., many tracks on Imagine Dragons's "Night Visions" felt like this to me).  Maybe it's not a big deal for you, just something I felt like I was conscious of as I listened.

Very good sound!  Voices were great in terms of the panning and volume.  I enjoyed the way they worked together.

If you had not queried the match up .... then joe public would just assume that was how its supposed to be!!

The query about why this isn't a top 40 produce track may well lie in its mastering

This might make u smile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQLmeSwtT4

master Fish

btw love your song as it is

I've listened to that YouTube video link before, the guys voice does make you smile and they way he tells it, but he's cleverly advertising his royalty free loops. Anyway, I'm with you on production in that a huge majority, could be as much as 99% don't download or listen to a song for the quality of the production, it's simply the artist and the song. OK it has to be a fairly decent production, it makes a great argument in to what degree of production would the same top 40 hit effect the amount people like/download it. You could say the same for the quality of your audio play back device. Again the average person would probably not hear the difference other than probably how loud it is.