I'm no pro, but I'm sitting on my first recording right now (will be released soon, will share the link here, it's gonna be free). What's most important is the EQ, that's right. But if you only do it by ear, it's not gonna be enough. You have to have a plan, otherwise the mix won't work. For example for the guitars, there's no need to have very low frequencies, so put a highpass filter on the guitars, Do this for all instruments, for every track. E.g. in the basedrum I cut out all mid frequencies, so it's not just low frequencies.
The next thing is where to "place" certain instruments in the mix. E.g. if you want to push 1.4kHz on the guitars (at least that's what I did), you should lower this frequency on other tracks. But not too much, just a tiny bit until you hear, that the guitars come out better without really being louder. Very important is the snare (in my opinion), look for the frequency which makes the snare shine. What's very hard, at least for me, is basedrum and bassguitar. I found good EQ settings now, but it took a lot longer than other settings. And of course the hardest of all is vocals, oh boy!!! My approach was to send the vox into two busses so I have three tracks for it with the same content. One of them I just compressed a bit, so it still sounds organic. In the second track I compressed the hell out of it and the third track was for a stereo enhancer effect to be able to make the vocals sound bigger. Then I create the vocal sound by finding the right balance between the three tracks.
Also very important is the reverb. I use one bus with one reverb effect and send stuff in there from the other tracks. I have quite a lot of reverb for the snare, a bit less for the hihat and toms. Use the ambience mics for giving the whole drumset a room, maybe send a bit of the ambience to the reverb aswell. The guitars and bass don't need a lot of reverb, but the vocals do. You could use a different reverb for the vocals, but I didn't do that, so I cannot give real hints there.
When doing the settings for the reverb, don't forget the predelay. I cannot really say much about reverb, I just changed values until I liked it.
What's really important is not to look at each instrument individually, but all of them as a whole. If e.g. the guitars don't sound as good as they could if you listen to only them, but sound great in the whole mix, that's when you got it right.
As I said, I'm no pro, so the above maybe doesn't make a lot of sense. But I showed my recording to others and they all liked it. All liked the sound, not all of them the music
