Nice. Sounds a lot better now. I think you might want to try moving the reverb after the distortion; the distortion gets a little abrasive on a few individual notes in your WIP and I'm guessing (and I could be wrong) that it's because the distortion plugin is processing a signal that has the current note plus the reverb from the previous note, and whenever you distort a signal with multiple different notes, it always gets a lot more noticeable than distorting a signal that just has a single note. Depending on whether or not that solves the issue, you could also try making the distortion a little softer and/or adding more EQ after the distortion.
>I did have a guitar fuzz distort filter on the vocal because it was suggested by a tutorial on mixing vocals with heavy rock instrumentals. Is that a bad choice?
Not necessarily. Using guitar distortion effects on vocals is definitely not something I would do every time by default, but sometimes that's what the mix needs. It's good to keep in mind with mixing tutorials is that they can show you how they use certain techniques in specific situations (which is still useful), but they can't tell you what techniques you need to use in
your mix to make it sound good because everything always depends on the source material and the context.
Specifically, I have found guitar distortion pedal simulators to be useful when the vocalist sounds a bit weak since they can give the voice a more aggressive character, especially on death metal style screaming vocals.
>(I'm also using default fx because I'm a casual)
That's fine, Reaper has a lot of stuff that's perfectly usable. For distortion though, I would recommend getting the
Variety Of Sound plugins (which are free) because you can use those to achieve softer, more analog style distortion effects that are especially nice on melodic vocals that need to cut through a dense metal mix without sounding too obviously distorted.