Mixing punk with The Berettas!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending the day with The Berettas, a fine punk band from Trumansburg, NY. This trio have been together for three years and have apparently been practicing because the tracks that they brought to me to mix were tight and well played. Like many bands these days, The Berettas saved some money and did the recording at a cheaper studio with a young engineer, and then turned to me and my experience to sort it all out in the mix. The young engineer at the other studio did an admirable job as most tracks sounded pretty good. The only issue was that there was more snare in the kick drum mic than kick drum, but, whatever, I made it work anyway.
For these mixes I decided to build a virtual analog console using Waves' fine API Collection console plugins, in particular, the API 550b equalizer. I put this plugin on every track and even without using the eq the tracks seem to glue together like a real analog console. These eqs also have a well deserved reputation for their sweet musical sound and their sonic signature lent itself well to this punk band. We mixed and mastered 5 songs in 7 hours and it sounds pretty great!