Recording - October 2019 - 24

DEAD MAN'S POP-REMIXING AND
REVISITING THE REPLACEMENTS
DON'T TELL A SOUL
Your mix has a lot of density and is very full, yet I
can hear everything.
I could have mixed it a little more sparse and sparingly, but I
really wanted the personalities of all the stuff we put on tape to
come through, including all the original background vocal stuff.
Again, I get why the label had Chris mix it like he did at the
time. If you have loud drums, you can kind of plow through a
lot of stuff, and it sounds great. If the guitars are tucked back,
you don't hear the mistakes. But with the remixes, I wanted
personality more than fidelity and sonics.

I notice more group vocals in the new mixes.
For the first time ever, you can hear Slim's voice. He's got this
really sensitive, shy singing voice that is so gorgeous, and you
can hear Chris's voice, and you can hear Tommy's voice. More
than anything else, it's the background vocals and the guitars
that I'm most happy about.

Any memory of what mics they sang through?
1988-would it have been a Neumann U 87?
I've never liked the U 87. Probably an AKG C414 or Neumann U 67.

Back then, would you have compressed to tape?
It's interesting, looking back at the vocal waveforms. I didn't
do much compression at all. They are really dynamic and have
a lot of room to breathe. In the new mix, I did more automated
vocal rides than compression, except on the lead vocal. Most
of these mixes are pretty bare bones when it comes to compression and plugins. I really wanted the listener to feel like they
were in the room with The Replacements.

What do you remember about the backward
delayed guitar on 'Darlin One'? Again, it's on both
CLA's mix and yours.
Luckily, that was printed on the A-reel. We took the reel off,
flipped it over, and marked the track so I knew which one it
was. Then we recorded the solo to the backwards printed audio, and we flipped it back again-old school analog, 1988.

The drums on that song are more of a room and kit
sound, where on the CLA mix it's predominantly a
snare track until the latter half of the song.
That was an interesting song. We had actually done the rolling snare as an overdub on top of the regular kit.

Full what?
Boneheaded! Originally Chris played the drums, but Paul decided he didn't want the drums sounding like drums. So, what I
did was, I took one of the samplers like an AMS or something and
used the 1 and 3 beats from a click track to feed a kick sample,
printed it, and then used an alternate quarter note click on the
2 and 4 beats to feed a snare sample. For this mix I brought
back Chris's drums, especially the overheads, so it's Chris playing
again, which is what I really wanted. Other than going back to
the original tempo on 'They're Blind', and going back to the original tempo of 'I'll Be You', bringing back Chris's drums on 'I Won't'
is probably the most significant change I made in the new mixes.

'I Won't' now has a classic Let It Be-era Replacements
sound. I love the big live drum sound, and again,
the prominent hard-panned guitars.
For that track there is no added reverb on the drums, it's
just the room mics. If you solo them, you can actually hear the
guitars in the room mics because everything was tracked live.

Would the bass have been tracked through an amp
or DI?
That's a good question. I think it was just DI, let me see-
[pulls up and solos Tommy's bass] yeah, this is very direct.

The last song I'm curious about is 'Rock and Roll
Ghost'. What was the synth on that one?
A Roland D-50 if I remember correctly. It was a very specific
sound that they had apparently used on a previous recording,
and so we hunted around to get it.

That song also features a very diffuse chorused
acoustic guitar in Chris's mix. In your mix, it's more
present and robust, and the synth sits behind it. Do
you remember how you would have miked that
back then?
I can see it's a mono track. Back then I probably had an SM57
on it and maybe a Shure SM81 or a Neumann U 67. I always
liked to blend a dynamic mic with a condenser mic printed on
one track, although nowadays I do put them on separate tracks.

So, you actually used the SM57 on acoustic guitar.
That's cool.

Again, that was D-Verb, but it was set to just a short 2.9
millisecond delay for more of a slapback sound.

If you said, "Matt, you can have multiples of only one microphone to make a record," I would pick the Shure SM57.
I can use it on Marshall amps, I can use it on snare drums, on
kick drums, on vocals. It is THE workhorse microphone that will
get the job done... and, you can use it as a hammer.

The drums on 'I Won't' are very different between
the two mixes.

Awesome. Well, hey Matt, the mixes sound incredible,
I really appreciate your insights and stories!

So, what reverb did you use to tie the two together?

Paul Westerberg went full boneheaded on that one.
24 RECORDING October 2019

I'm happy to do it!

Recording - October 2019

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