Every moment is a pleasure to listen to! I noticed your arrangement and orchestration skills have improved immensely. The writing sounds very clean, smooth and deliberate. The structure is full of nice surprises and never gets stale. The percussion writing, especially toward the end, is phenomenal.
Some mixing comments:
- The reverb feels too large and diffused. For this kind of song, I think a more intimate, cozy room would work better and would provide more clarity. If you want a grandiose sense of space, what you could do is use two reverb buses, one with similar settings to what you have now, and one that's more intimate, and divide the instruments into two groups, foreground and background.
- The mix feels too dark for this kind of music. You can boost the highs (10K+) on the sticks, hi hats. and snares. If you find that they poke out too much with this boost, you can try adding some saturation on top. I suggest using saturation either way on the hi hats/shakers.
- I think you can boost or saturate around 200hz on the snare.
- The piano could maybe benefit from some dynamic EQ to tame some spikes, likely between 1 and 2k.
-The toms sound a little muddy. You can probably cut between 200hz and 700hz.
- You can likely boost the highs a bit on some of the more mellow melodic instruments, like the sax on the left.
I hope this helps! Good luck in the NGADM. This is a very solid and fun submission <3