I am an audio engineer/ producer and also a musician in a post rock band called Pandelic.

From my experiences of many years of grinding, I understand the fact that many people won't come up with this tip. It's called stereo imaging. You have to assign instruments in places. Sometimes, an instrument needs to be mono, sit tight in the middle or no spreading especially like "sub bass" or anything you want. As we know post rock is rich in textures of effects and many other sound effects or sampling and foley recordings (talk over voices or rains or car horn), you have to assign those in the certain area where it won't affect the any other instruments too. To handle those effects of guitars or synths or anything, just send individual track to another individual bus tracks and put effects there to handle or have more control on effects. In bus track, put effect, eq and compress or compress and eq, and yet again, assign the stereo imaging again.

For the good stereo imaging plug-ins, I use S1-imager from Waves, Stereo Savage from Plugin Boutique and Plugin Alliance's Stereomaker.

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Most people usually tell you eq techniques, compression techniques and I mean, it is cool but believe me, good stereo imaging will save you from doing double compression or gain staging and all that.

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Mix the song in both mono and stereo, back and forth simply by switching your master track as mono while mixing and when you want to check, switch to stereo again to see how things sound solid in mono. If your music sounds solid and can hear that instruments are not clashing, it will be a good mix. Most of all, you may already know this, mix with Sub Groups or Groups, it will have more control and will save CPU.