I just wanted to share what for me has been a revelation. Sorry if everybody knows about this already....I have no way of knowing

A while ago I got hold of the stems for bohemian rhapsody and spent days listening to the tracks trying to hear what made them gel together, changing them with various FX, balances to see what difference that made.... although the FX are printed, and learning a lot .Many surprises for me in there...... like all the intro is Freddie, contrary to the vid.

I now have a collection of stems from many genres of music and have started using individual tracks to reference my individual tracks. As we know, once something is in the mix, like for instance a delay just to give more presence, you dont hear it in the mix. I have been amazed at just how much delay and reverb can be on say a vocal track, without you being aware of it. I have done this on my own mixes.....blending in until you are just aware then backing off, but to hear your favourite vocal track on it's own was for me a very useful learning tool.

The down side is that the further back you go.......tape and particularly the four track days.......you inevitably will have less isolation......lead plus all BV's on the same track for example is common.
I got to thinking about this while watching Rick Beato's series on youtube "Why this song is great" where he forensically pulls apart songs stem by stem to reveal their greatness.

There is no secret to getting these stems. A google search 'song name/artist multitrack' will get some hits. There are torrents too.
Sorry to have gone on for so long, didn't seem able to condense the message further and I know the modern brain has trouble coping with this from studies I have read.
Anyway I hope this helps someone

 

Well, nothing new for me.. but I agree. I remember when I first heard HQ stems of a studio recording (fx baked in). I would never say that the sum of those parts can make the end track. Two things were esp noticeable - the vocal drenched in rev/delay and really shitty sounding guitars. When listening to the end product, the vocal was "in your face" and all the guitars, pianos, synths.. in the right place.

I mostly found out that the sum of really good, meaty, fat, shiny sounding instruments = mud ;). Good sounding stuff take advantage of up/down (fq), left/right, depth ..and a ton of other "tricks" (harmonics, sc..) to balance the mix across all the available sound space.

That being said, I am grateful for every (engineering) info that I get here and elsewhere. These days a good presentation of your product is mandatory and I won't take every crappy tune to the pros. But(!) If I thought that a song/comp is worthy of further attention, I would certainly ask a pro to mix it. Or at least record/mix the part(s) that are especially important, like vocals..

 

There used to be a lot of shared stems or multi track shares on the sister site.

 

if they are expired on sister site you can ask the cleaner for a re-up, or as said above there are some good torrents out there

Even guys who do guitar tuts on youtube use these tracks to work out the exact licks you would like to know from your favorite
songs... so many of the educational videos contain some guy's "interpretation" of the part.. and his "shortcuts"
to know exactly what the artist did.. the isolated tracks are the only way to go...

 

Thanks for the reply
I have to say that they do vary a lot, I have had wavs, ogg and mogg files some of them raw tracks too. I agree that if you compared the summed parts of a lot of thefiles with the original, they would be disparate, but close enough for me not to think that any extra processing had been done rather than just inferior format conversion But to reverse engineer the mix was for me enlightening..... with a known song rather than just a random track I had never heard before which is what you get in all tutorials. That was my point

 

Beats slowing the track down in the daw or other specialist software, or as i used to do play the record at 16 RPM conveniently an octave lower... ish

 

This is a great idea.
I wonder if any recently mixed metal multi-track existed on the internet, for example, I like the sound of Symphony X last three albums.