Well hello there, dear reader.
Over the past few years, I feel like we’ve built up a bit of trust. Some rapport perhaps. So you know I would never suggest that you do something that is considered in any way illegal.
Oh, goodness no!
But what I will say, is that wouldn’t it be amazing if a music based video game came out that featured a LOT of really cool songs by really cool bands? And wouldn’t it be even better if the way that this game was programmed allowed a tech savvy individual to maybe glimpse under the skirt of some very famous (and kickass) mixes?
Let’s call this totally fictional game “Srockband”. Now due to the way this game is played, it is necessary for the programmers to have individual song stems for each song. Which means for every cool mix, there is a drum stem, a guitar stem, etc, etc. Hypothetically speaking, you could have a cool song like “Socket Wrench” by the band Goo Fighters, and 
this game would have all these individual stem files for the song. And if you had access to these individual files, you could listen to exactly what is happening to the solo’d drums. You could listen to how the mixer treated the vocals. You could hear just how much distortion the bass guitar is getting. Wouldn’t that be really, really helpful in your mixing journey?
Of course, I would never do anything like this, but I’ve heard that if you google some combination of the words “rockband” and “mogg files” and then downloaded the free VLC player, you could pop those stem files in and listen to TONS of individual stem files from TONS of really popular songs with great mixes.
Imagine that…wouldn’t that help when you’re mixing with references? Wouldn’t that be an incredible learning tool?
It’s just a damn shame that something like that will probably never exist.
Make Your Mixes Not Suck 