Recording - October 2019 - 22

DEAD MAN'S POP-REMIXING AND
REVISITING THE REPLACEMENTS
DON'T TELL A SOUL

Where did you do the new mixes?

featured the shambolic Replacements vibe, and we were able to
also capture some really ferocious playing on tape. That vibe is
one of the things that got a little bit lost in the originally released
mix. The label wanted a particular sound, and I understand all
that stuff, but it did go against the grain of what Paul and I wanted. I think Chris Lord-Alge is very talented-and he did get 'I'll
Be' on the radio. He added the gated reverb on the snare, the
chorus on the guitars, and he basically smoothed out the rough
edges and made the band sound more 'professional', which
might have made their sound a little more accessible but concurrently seemed to have put off some of the die-hard Replacements
fans-a number of people told me directly.

Did you stay in Pro Tools, or mix through outboard?

Do you remember your reaction upon first hearing
the finished album back in 1989?
I remember that we got the mixes and it just sounded so
different from what we had envisioned. Our control had been
rightly or wrongly taken away by the label and I honestly wanted to mix this record at the time and showcase the guts of the
band and its charisma, but the label wanted to push for hits.
Two weeks after I finished Don't Tell a Soul, I produced and mixed
The Real Thing album for Faith No More, and that's what put me
on the map-before that, nobody had any faith in me as a mixer.

How did the opportunity to remix Don't Tell a Soul
come about?
Guitarist Slim Dunlap's wife Chrissy found my original rough
mixes along with a substantial pile of analog tapes, in a cabinet
in her basement. These were mixes that I initially spent about
twenty minutes each on, and she gave them to Bob Mehr. Bob
was really excited about the energy and spirit captured, and
then he brought them to Rhino with the idea of a remix.
When you first put the old tapes up, what initially stood out?
I knew that 'I'll Be You' was sped up a little bit per Lenny
Waronker on the original Don't Tell a Soul album. When I put up
the mix of 'They're Blind', this time around I heard that it was slower. I was like, "Oh my god, there are two different versions!" but
it was actually the same one and our original intention in terms of
tempo felt right to me. When I put up that song and 'Talent Show',
after all these years, I was like, "Oh-that's The Replacements!"

How many tracks were most of the songs?
We did the whole album initially on 24-track tape. We also
had some B-reels with different vocals, additional drums, extra
guitar parts, and mellotron parts for some of the songs that the
label had requested, and Chris Lord-Alge mixed from those. The
bad news is that those reels are gone, and so, the remixing I did
is from the A-reels that the band and I initially turned in to the
label. For better or worse, we were missing the final icing on the
cake that Paul, Slim and I had recorded in an effort to complete
the record in a way that felt better to Warner Brothers. But, remixing without those B-reels means that I'm actually mixing the
original version of the record as the band envisioned!
22 RECORDING October 2019

I mixed it at my place in Pro Tools on the same Tannoy Super Gold
monitors with Mastering Lab crossovers that I used to mix Faith No More
Angel Dust and Songs About Jane by Maroon 5. I've had them for a
long-ass time, and I know them really well, so that's what I mixed on.

No outboard, and I used minimal plugins. I took the approach of utilizing the tones we originally committed to tape.
There are a very few times I had to fix something egregious
like a missing chord or something, but generally, Pro Tools was
used just like a tape machine.

What plugins did you use?
Most of what I used for plugins is older stuff that came with
Pro Tools. I am a big fan of the original McDSP stuff and for EQ
I used their FilterBank six-band EQ. For compression, I used the
older Bomb Factory 1176, and on the master bus I used Native
Instruments Supercharger for some glue and compression.
For delay, I used Soundtoys EchoBoy, and I would typically
set the delay time manually because not all of the songs were
completely locked into the click track tempo. Sometimes it was
in tempo, and sometimes it drifted a bit because that's how we
did stuff in the analog world.

'We Will Inherit The Earth' has a cool delay on the
chorus, and it's still there on your mix. Was that
printed to tape, or did you recreate it?
On the original, I think we printed it, but it was on the lost
B-reel, so I had to recreate it with EchoBoy.

On 'Asking Me Lies', CLA's mix was dreamy 80s
pop, but the new mix sounds more like '78 Some
Girls-era Rolling Stones.
Thank you, yes!

I love where the vocal sits in your mix, especially
the slapback reverb.
That's Pro Tools D-Verb. Recently I've started using Valhalla DSP,
but on these mixes, I'm pretty sure I was primarily using D-Verb.
I just don't think the gear matters. It's really the person utilizing it
and you take it and make it work for you...or I'm just damn lazy.
The only thing that I use that's newer and fancy is Brainworx bx_stereomaker. On certain mono tracks, it widens them up a bit; I can set
them back in the mix easier. I do that a lot with background vocals.

The original Don't Tell a Soul mixes are characterized
by big drum reverbs and prominent lead vocals, but
everything else is washed out. In your mixes, the
drums are in more of a classic rock room space,
and the guitars are thick and wide.
I've always been a big fan of discrete, hard-panned guitars and
even sometimes background vocals, as I want one personality on
one side and one personality on the other. One of the things I'm not
so keen on in mixes of that era, is that the guitars often just sound
like 'big mono'. This can sound quite powerful, and a lot of people
like it, but I like one guitar left and one guitar right. Sometimes one
guitar just disappears or stops playing, and the other guitar is still
going and I like that. It becomes a rhythmic push/pull thing.

Recording - October 2019

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