Hey @rockinblockhead, this track is awesome! I don’t think it was rejected because of the mixing quality. My guess is that your drum samples are the culprit. The crash in particular. It becomes very prominent starting around 0:30 and kills an otherwise well-crafted track.
Having said that, here are a few suggestions to improve your mixes:
Have you tried sidechaining the bass to the kick drum? You’ll have to set very fast attack and release values at this tempo, but it will help you to seperate the kick and the bass.
If your drum sampler allows you to tune the kick, tune it to the song’s key.
Speaking of the song’s key, Google the term “note frequency chart”. Look up the song’s key and find out what its frequency is. The bass will be dwelling on this note/frequency for a good part of the song. Now double that frequency and boost it by a couple of dB (ex. the open E string on a 4 string bass has a frequency of 41 Hz. If your song is in E, boost 41x2=82 Hz by a couple of dB). What you’re doing here is boosting the first harmonic of that note. You’re tricking the brain into thinking that the fundamental (ie 41 Hz) is louder as well, although it isn’t. Plus this will make the bass more audible on systems with smaller speakers (TV sets, laptops, etc).
Once you’ve taken care of the low end, you can now roll back the hi-pass on your guitars to give them more body.
Good luck!