I've made this mistake a few times in my life. I came across some tapes from 1996, so I loaded them into Nuendo. I figured that since I have many more tools at my disposal now (as opposed to an analog mixer and limited outboard), I could really make this thing sound like I thought it should in the first place.
I was wrong. With all the drum replacement, UAD plugins, and 15 years more experience, it ended up sounding essentially the same.
That was the second time I made that mistake. The first was when I got the tapes to an old EP that I had done and decided to replay all the guitars. The guitar sound was a sore point from the get-go because the original studio was very small and didn't let the amps breath. (we ended up using combos instead of half stacks) So, the other guitar player and I retracked the guitars, then mixed it. To this day, I can't tell which version I'm listening to until it gets to a part of one of the songs that had an effect that we couldn't recreate on the remix.
Stuff tends to sound like what it wants to. The more you have to shoe-horn a mix together, the worse the results.
Yeah, I think we all have been through that at least once or twice.
I think I've told the story before about the mix I did for this guy who used to record all his own tracks to an old 8-track R-to-R. He always gave me some very interesting stuff to mix, but he had this one cut that was a capture of lightning in a bottle; just one of those moments that clicked like the heavens were smiling on him that day; he had these dueling lead guitar tracks that just worked so perfectly together in a way that you just couldn't purposely re-create in a hundred years.
Anyway, because of this special quality in the performance, this has been a cut that I've gone back to a couple of time over the years and tried remixing, exactly like you say, with the knowledge that I had the extra experience and improved gear and fresh ears and whatnot. Yet nothing I could ever do with the new gear or new techniques sounded any better than the original, and many attempts sounded worse.
One of these years I'd like to re-track the rhythm and accompaniment parts and keep the original guitar work, because the drum sounds he used are kind of primitive by today's standards and also because either the heads or the tape on his Otari were getting a bit worn by that time I think (that machine has long since been retired), so updating the rest of the tracks, building around the original lightning guitar tracks would be an interesting project.
But re-mixing what's there now is just really a futile exercise; it turns out my first instincts and work with that mix were the right ones and that the mix just won't go any farther than that.
That's I think one of the hard parts about starting out in this racket; at the beginning it's hard to have either the confidence or the knowledge to know when you've hit that mixability limit. I call it when you feel like you're trying to scratch an itch that just won't scratch. Or, as you very nicely put it, when you feel like you're chasing your tail. Either way,that itchy tail is usually a pretty good sign that you have at least reached a point of diminishing returns, if not an outright end to them.
G.
