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@dooks
Thanks budday. I've bitten the bullet and have gone back to the start. Rather than a year zero approach I've just bypassed rather than removed all my plugins so I can always pop them back in to see if they are in fact needed. I've kept the three aux reverb sends of room, vocal plate and long vocal plate.
I've grouped and coloured everything into subsections of: bass/percussion/guitars/accordion/banjo/brass/lead vocal(s)/and BVs. As the upright was the last thing to be added have decided to start building from the ground up so I'm starting with percussion and bass then adding instruments one or to at a time to build up a mix.
As a rule I'm binning any individual instances of compression, then revisiting the EQ settings. I've gotten much more adept at handling the channel EQ since I did these mixes which is helping. I'm only adding back compression if it's essential to manage levels and make something sit better in the mix... or in the case of the lead vocal as an effect in that i'm using it with a low ratio and the gain cranked for a "gritalizer" effect. So far I've managed to remove compression from everything but bass, banjo and lead vocals.
Allowing the guitars and accordion to breathe a bit more seems to have brought the track back to life a bit. I've reset the compression on the banjo so it's more like a limiter with a much higher threshold (just below 0db) and a super fast attack, release and ratio setting. The idea being that it leaves the signal alone to ebb and flow as much as possible but leaps into action whenever a rogue twang threatens to spike the vu meter into nasty digital overs. Banjo is hard instrument to record like that...
Getting there. I'm having an enforced break because faulty monitor is faulty. Good idea to reset ears anyway.
Wine?