I'm starting this thread because of some interesting posts on the (almost ill-fated) Zoolander thread, some of which I will move here below.
I agree that there often seems to be the need for outside mixing of one's project. But I've never had it work out to my satisfaction.
Once all of the pre-production, tracking, overdubbing, vocalising, comping, re-overdubbing, re-comping, etc., etc., etc., is finally finished, I almost always just DREAD the mix. Don't get me wrong, I like the mixing process. It's just that in many cases, no matter how much I like the music, I've just had enough of it for awhile. I ALWAYS wish terribly for at least a couple of weeks between finishing recording and starting mixing. Of course, this is NEVER a possibility. Everyone is always in too big of a hurry. So it just starts, and it always gets done, and it's usually pretty good.
Back in the mid-80's I had a conversation with Bob Clearmountain about this when we were both up at Masterdisk with Bob Ludwig one day . At the time, he was producing several projects, such as Bryan Adams and others, as well as performing his customary mixing for so many. He agreed that as Producer, it sometimes felt like someone else should mix the project one had spent so long in preparing. We jokingly said that we would swap...he would mix my productions, and I would mix his. Now, I am quite sure that Bob really didn't want me mixing his stuff, and was just making an offhand comment...of course, I would much more have welcomed his mixes! But in the end, even if this small talk had come to more fruition, I doubt that even I would have done it. Bob has never mixed one of my things, so I can't comment with experience (but I admire his work so very much that I'm sure it would have been great), but I have had several other REALLY-BIG-NAME mixers mix things I tracked and/or produced, and I have never found any of them to be totally satisfactory, according to my vision of what it should have been (and what I believe I would have done myself).
One example of this was several years ago when I engineered all tracking and overdubbing of a very well known group's album. I had stated at the very beginning that I would love to engineer it, but I would not accept the mixing...why? Because their previous album had been mixed by Tom L-A, and I thought that it was brilliant (no, I don't like everything he does, in fact I DON'T like a lot of it...but this one was really good, just what the project needed). It made no sense to me for ANYONE else to mix their new one! So I made a conscious effort in tracking to just get very good, clean sounds, untreated by effects. I made sure that there was a perfect set of building blocks there which he could mangle and manipulate in whatever ways he thought best...I believed that this would provide the best album for the group. But at the end of the day, TLA wanted so much money to do it, the group balked (after throwing up). I was by then already booked for another project right when this one's tracking finished, so another well known mixer was given the job. He did absolutely NOTHING at all to the tracks. No effects, no level changes, no NOTHING; in fact, barely even reverb. Sounded like faders just set to basic levels, and the tapes copied. If I had known this, I would have performed many effects and other production values, recorded onto the multi's. The album was effectively ruined. The group agreed, and knew all of this, but was so much past the deadlines, and with som much money already spent, they just sadly went with it. Not a very pretty picture!
Anyway, the upshot of all this is, that I have just decided to always mix my own stuff...it's the only way I think I will get what I want. But I still sure wish I had that 2 weeks...