Interesting idea. Could you maybe explain further how does it help you adjust your tone and playing? I mean how does listening to commercial tracks concretely help you adjusting your tone? Thanks for your input.
There's always going to be a difference between a live sound and a recorded/mixed/mastered sound. You have to be able to kind of separate that in your head. It's easier with very good live recordings (even though they're still mixed and limited....they're usually messed with a little less than, say, a loudness war casualty from the 90s).
But...if I can play along with a song that I know, with me set about right in the mix, with both playing through my mains or my in-ears, it seems like that's closer to what would work in that context. It's mostly that it's really easy to set up and hear by myself rather than either having to make/record an entire track just to hear myself in context or (theoretically) making other people wait for me while I tweak little things they can't hear. You could use backing tracks the same way.
It's kind of answering the question: "what would I have to do to fit in with their mix if I was another guitarist at that performance?" If I have to add drastic EQs or compression or do a bunch of DAW tricks....either that mix doesn't work for what I'm trying to do or the sound coming out of the Fractal is very wrong.
I'm not convinced that it's the "best" way to do it. But, it seems like a better "starting point" than just making something that sounds good in isolation.
The funny thing is that when I take sounds I've tweaked like that and then play them in isolation....they still sound good. Usually more band-limited, a little fizzier, a little thinner. But still a good sound.
If I go the other way and try to set something up that sounds great in isolation an then try to play with other musicians, backing tracks, live recordings, or pretty much anything else....I start tweaking again.
I did this before Fractal with a more traditional rig as well, and it worked decently.
As far as the isolated guitar tracks....they're more of a concrete reference for how far I
can go, especially with band-limiting, and still wind up with something that I can expect will sound good in context. For that, it works better to find sounds on the "edge" of what I like. For example, if I know a recording that has a guitar that is just barely not too strident in the mix and can find an isolated guitar track for it....then I have a concrete reference for how strident of a sound I like. If I also can find an isolated track that's just barely not too mellow in the full track, then I have a concrete reference on the other end of that particular aspect.
So as long as my guitar-only sounds are "between" them, it's going to be okay. If you wind up with enough things like that, they define a creative "fence". As long as you stay inside that fence, you're free to create and explore with the confidence that you're not going off the deep end in some nonproductive direction.
FWIW, that general idea (define the fence, then literally just play inside it) is also how I learned to mix and master. And while I'm neither famous nor prolific (so take it with a grain of salt)....I have done those things professionally and am pretty confident in my abilities. And I seemed to pick them up faster than a lot of the people I was learning with. I definitely stole the way I describe it from Brian Lucey, but it seemed like the right way to do it basically right after my first total cluttered mess of a mix in the electronic music lab in high school. In his words "There's no freedom without a fence." ....because you don't know how far is far enough until you can define too far.
In my mind, reference tracks don't define any kind of target. They define the edges of good. Yes, I have some "amazing" mixes/masters in my collection of reference tracks. But, they're definitely the minority.
If you've been performing or recording for a while and have multitracks of your own stuff...and you can just mute yourself from the recorded mix, that's probably even better. I'm sure there are other ways to hear what you're doing "in context", but that seems like one easy way to do it alone. And as your "career" progresses, you can just move from basing your fence off other people's music to using your own.
