Musicians: Once Dead Recording/Mixing

For all of you musicians out there I have a question. How much of the recording quality has to do with the actual recording process (egineer), versus mixing? Can an album be poorly recorded and then saved with proper mixing? For example, if mistakes were made during the recording process by the engineer could they then be hidden during mixing? Could somebody like Andy Sneap, known for producing polished finished metal products save an album like Visions from Hell, even if it sounded like a demo coming in, or is it dependent on what he receives by the recording engineer? Of course, all of this assumes that the musicians did there part and actually played well on the album. How much of it is mixing versus the actual recording?

Everything starts on the "front end" (placing the microphones, getting good clean tones) first...sometimes things can be touched up or tweaked in mixdown, a bad front end tone can't be saved short of sound replacement (replacing organic tones with samples)...

If the drums are recorded poorly, it's really hard to fix them after the fact. It's pretty important to get the drum sound as close to what you want when recording as possible. Once the tracks are laid down, there are some things that can be done with mixing, IQ, mastering, etc. but there is really no getting away from a poor recording.

With Ultimatum's Mechanics CD. I HATED the snare sound when we were recording it. I commented to the engineer that it sounded to high and poppy like the snare wasn't tuned correctly. He kept assuring me, "we'll fix it in the mix". Of course, that never happened. He tried EQing it to please me, but I always hated that snare sound.

If you've recorded the snare with a trigger, you can easily change the sound because it's all computerized sounds, as opposed to a natural recording. Many bands go this direction these days. You can also easily fix mistakes that way.

The members of Candlemass complained about the recording process of "Ancient Dreams", they were assured it would be taken care of in the mix, it was not. The remaster of Black Sabbath's "Born Again" sounds little different than the original, Geezer has said he would love to remix that one, I don't think it would help much. It's kind of like putting too much sugar in your coffee, or too much salt on one's food, there's only so much you can do to cover it up, it's usually best to throw it out and start over. The problem w/that is the cost of recording is a bit more expensive than a fresh cup of joe!