We all like to think that we get better as we gain experience and spend lots of cash on expensive toys. How to be sure? I'm advocating the Nemesis Project. Eh, what did he say, the what?!?
Some years ago a band I was in recorded a very rough set of tracks in a single session shortly before the studio owner (and Drummer - hi Matt) had to vacate his studio. The set-up was done in a very short time and the playing was rather less than stellar - guitars played poorly, drums premixed to 2 track with too much spill from everything, vocal and BV pre-mixed to 2-track, bass rattling and out of tune, suspect timing, the rattle of beer bottles and did I mention my appalling guitar playing? Perfect Nemesis Project then!
I remix this project probably every 9 months or so. It is a perfect opportunity to try all the new features of my chosen DAW (I'm on Cubase 6 at the moment so I get drum and bass replacement testing Cubase's new transient detection algorithm, new group editing, new tempo detection), to try-out any new techniques, test any new plugins (I'm currently remixing using the SSL Duende Native plugs that I'm beta testing) and I always re-record all the guitar parts so I get to try the new guitars, amps and microphones that somehow keep on appearing in my studio. The point is that there is so much wrong with this project that I get to try-out just about every mix and fix technique that I can think-up or steal (I've widened it, narrowed it, parallel compressed it, multi-channel compressed it, limited it, expanded it, gated it, distorted it, duplicated and delayed and pitch-shifted it, pitch corrected it, timing corrected it, eqd bits that I don't like, replaced bits that I don't like, duplicated bits that I do like, re-arranged it, made it sparse, made it dense, distorted it some more; I've mixed it with only native Cubase plugins, with only freeware plugins, with the best of what I've got plugins) then I've done it again only on headphones! It's so good because it's so bad, it suffers from just about every fault known to the world of recording, there is no deadline, no one waiting for the result, and when the 2-track is mixed and compared with the previous versions there's nowhere to hide.
I remix this project probably every 9 months or so. It is a perfect opportunity to try all the new features of my chosen DAW (I'm on Cubase 6 at the moment so I get drum and bass replacement testing Cubase's new transient detection algorithm, new group editing, new tempo detection), to try-out any new techniques, test any new plugins (I'm currently remixing using the SSL Duende Native plugs that I'm beta testing) and I always re-record all the guitar parts so I get to try the new guitars, amps and microphones that somehow keep on appearing in my studio. The point is that there is so much wrong with this project that I get to try-out just about every mix and fix technique that I can think-up or steal (I've widened it, narrowed it, parallel compressed it, multi-channel compressed it, limited it, expanded it, gated it, distorted it, duplicated and delayed and pitch-shifted it, pitch corrected it, timing corrected it, eqd bits that I don't like, replaced bits that I don't like, duplicated bits that I do like, re-arranged it, made it sparse, made it dense, distorted it some more; I've mixed it with only native Cubase plugins, with only freeware plugins, with the best of what I've got plugins) then I've done it again only on headphones! It's so good because it's so bad, it suffers from just about every fault known to the world of recording, there is no deadline, no one waiting for the result, and when the 2-track is mixed and compared with the previous versions there's nowhere to hide.
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