Studio multisession files

It definitely is very useful to hear these sorts of things. Also search for the 'weathervane stems' which are quite good (and legally available unlike most of the multi-tracks of commercial tunes.) It really gives you a feeling for how things fit together and that's the real trick. We can all within some reasonable amount of time learn to record individual instruments so that they sound pretty good. But the trick is composition and recording sounds that fit together in some desirable way. It's really tough to do well.

And yeh, I also agree on the fix it in the mix. Some of this, to be fair, comes from the fact that professional mixers often don't record the material. They get what they get and they have to be able to deal with whatever they get, and they get kudus (aka bucks) for being able to do that well.

So many of us come along and hear all this talk and we get the feeling that that's what it's all about. But that's not what it's supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about capturing a good performance of a good composition really well. And yeh, there's always some enhancements to do without getting stupid, adding ambience, panning, some level automation perhaps if that couldn't somehow be actually performed, some effects. But it'll never sound better than capturing it well to begin with.

For those of us who record ourselves, we are the ones who have the luxury of recording all the material and being the song writer and composer and such. So we are in a position to try to get it right to begin with. It makes much more sense to me to learn how to record it well than to spend all your time fixing it after the fact.

It would also help if more of us could get ourselves away from the belief that anything that doesn't sound super-compressed and completely defect free is amateurish. That has been the biggest damage that all of this has caused. You can no longer be human and professional hardly.

+1/2

A lot of this seems personal preference, old school vs new school, technique vs. holistic art ... and a lot of other confusion.

For me ... 'Depends on genre, producer, preferences, etc., rarely initial performance sketches (especially since mine suck --haha!)

Personally, I prefer beatz while dancing ... and hate fancy old-school guitar riffs, operatics, etc.

... OTOH, my collab cronies are often performance freaks -- haha!  And 'Tis their performance perfectionism which prevents their inspiration.

The greatest hip-hop producer-loops oft have the shoddiest performances, the worst vocs, and the most hyper-maximized nuances ... its all so counter-intuitive ... these happy accidents --LOL.

Reprobate Hip hop isn't going away anytime soon.

For me, there remains a lot of leeway: A producer's job seems holistic to make beauty with 'acceptable' performances/samples/selections.  Producer-artists and groove-meisters take the ordinary and make it extraordinary ... etc. 

Also, "performance" definition oft seems like "light" and "time" ... I might even measure "performance parameters" but human performances are ellusive to me.  Or if the performer is sincerely happy, I'm happy --haha?!

Or: Yesterday's performance is today's sample; today's sample is tomorrow's perforance --lol.

"Is that a real guitar?"  --lol.

I was getting advice from a recording engineer in Toronto.  He said that if I were apprenticing with him, I would be banned from using eq for a year to force me to get the tracks sounding right at the source.  And yes he did play me some stuff.  Raw tracks without any processing and they sounded amazing to me.

I have not mixed anything for some time but I might set up a personal challenge to minimize eq while mixing so I force myself to get it right at the source.

But you probably won't ever get there unless you have excellently tracked versions of good compositions. Without that, just balancing will be somewhat limited in what it can accomplish. If those things are done really well, in theory, nothing but balance would be required to have a nice sounding mix, if f/x were committed to during the tracking phase.

If ambience wasn't used in tracking, then that would be a bit of a problem since it would be kind of hard to achieve the desired depth of field without the addition of some ambience in the mix I guess. So the dry version would be fairly flat.
 
Oh, and yeh, I'm still very much struggling to get there as well. I just do pieces, then I mix them and see what I had to change in order to get the parts really fitting together. And I try to use those hard lessons the next time. One thing for sure is REALLY listening when you track, and doing so with the track you are recording at the level it will be in the mix, not artificially elevated. Otherwise, you can't mix yourself as you play because you aren't hearing the track as it should be relative to the other stuff. And since balance is hugely important wrt to what sort of frequency content a part should have, if you want to do your part in the playing to improve the mix, you need to hear what the part is going to sound like. There's so much you can do with picking style, picking position, what pickup settings to use, dynamics, etc... and of course changing that up all the time in some cases to optimize the tone of the instrument at any given time.
 
I'm really trying to do this and it has helped a lot. I really try to listen to what I'm playing as I'm tracking it and asking myself if it fits and what I can do to make it fit better, and if it has more frequency real estate than it really needs to do its job.

Right back around 1980 when I built my first studio, I was into producing a lot of electronic music. I had all the hardware synths at the time and I was using a 4 track and 2 track reel to reel setup and also had an old Teac Model 2 mixer. It was only 6 channels but there was no EQ on any channel, only a HP and LP filter from memory.

Because of this fairly severe limitation (if you could call it that) I was forced to alter the sound of the synths themselves by spending much more time editing the actual patch. If I needed it brighter or bassier etc I had to do it all in the synth because I had no other way of doing it. I think because of this it has probably had a profound effect on me.  It made me really learn the techniques of synth programming.

It is very similar to getting sounds right directly at the source.  Even today when I produce music like that I very rarely have any EQ on any synths. I still get in there and either search for the right preset, edit an existing one or make the sound from scratch.  And I don't really print it until it sounds right.  And back then I had to imagine what was going to happen with repeated transfers across 4 track and 2 track etc and I was good at allowing for it too. Not so important these days obviously.

The classic conpcept of setting up two mikes on a guitar cab and have one fixed and the other movable is also a very interesting idea. When you sum them the range of tonal variations is quite staggering actually.

With drums a bit of tuning goes a long way. Tighten that bottom snare head a bit, are the snare wires working correctly and buzzing right. Tune the top head too. (Change the heads all together) You can alter the bottom end and the top end by doing all these things. Move a microphone a small amount. It seems to sound better than tracking something almost right and trying to bring it up to speed with EQ. With the kick the best thing you can do is get the drummer to play the kick and get your head down there where the mic is and listen to it! It might not sound that great so tune it, change the damping around etc and viola you will come up with a great kick sound. Then mike it.

It is a bit like Ramsay yelling to his apprentice chefs... "....taste your f***ing food!!!!!" It is amazing how many chef's send food out they have not tasted!

Back in the analog days if you patch anything into a signal flow then you are altering the sound in some way. The same applies with digital plugins. Take a Hi Fi approach and get back to minimum interference of the sound you are capturing. Put the least amount of processors in line, get the sound some other way.

We have got too many options and we are all using all of them because we can. I mean even having 8 tracks for years forced me to take stock of parts that were unnecessary and keeping ones that were etc.. It really teaches you about unncessary parts in music!