Thank you very much for your kind words and your question!
I do like to build up slowly and go crescendo so I tend to pile up layers upon layers but then as you said, it gets really hard to mix and this jam was challenging to mix for me (my right ear is totally fucked up and I only mix with headphones so not really sure how people are hearing my music. so take everything I say with a huge grain of salt!)
I started with an acoustic guitar/vocal idea then added 2 electric guitars (each hard panned right and left) then added the bass with the piano sound from the Digitone then the drums. At this stage, all the sounds were all in a different area frequency wise (electric guitars are played in a higher range than the acoustic guitar most of the time). The electric guitars and piano are a bit problematic but the sound is very different so I emphasized the area that would not clash with my voice mainly.
Then I added pads, strings, birds and the idea to live sample my vocal so it was starting to get a bit busy. birds are in a very high frequency range (got rid of everything below 3khz I think!) so they don’t really clash. The pad is more of a short climax thing so that’s ok I guess. The problem is/was the strings. I did clean them up a lot so that they wouldn’t clash too much with my vocal.
The live vocal sample goes hand in hand with my main vocal but is hard panned most of the time so they don’t clash that much (I don’t check mono translation though) and work as doubled most of the time anyway.
So I guess I tried to arrange everything by keeping in mind that each element should occupy a specific area of the frequency range (strings being the exception)!
Then I use side-chain stuffs (EQ, comp) a lot… which shows that my arrangement choices are not the best ha.
But it’s a lot of trials and errors. Sometimes I just mute an element and listen without it (Do I really need it?) and then increase the volume slowly again. I did this many many times for the strings in order to find the right spot to my ears.