Recording - October 2019 - 27

Do you fix and clean first and
then run it through your analog
mastering chain?
Good question. I do it after I capture it
from the analog gear, but before the final
limiting and processing. The reason I do it
after the capture is, if I were to fix something
that was meant to be left in, it is super easy
for me to get back to that point. If I clean it
up before the analog chain and someone's
like, oh, we actually really love that weird
thing that you thought was a problem, for
me to fix that would be a lot of backtracking. So, unless it's like a huge plosive or
thump that's going to trigger my dynamics
like crazy, I print the mix through the analog
chain first and then fix things after that.

Let's dig more into the Dead
Man's Pop set. I'm assuming that
the mixed audio files were sent
to you digitally.
Matt sent me 24-bit / 48 kHz WAV files
of his fresh Don't Tell a Soul mixes. We had
to do these first because the album was
getting cut to vinyl. The other files came in
at 96 kHz from Brian Kehew, who mixed
the bonus tracks and live show. I was also
given a list of notes from Jason Jones at
Rhino, and writer Bob Mehr, who were
both in charge of producing the whole set.

What kind of notes did they send?
They trusted me with the sound, so it was
more about what to cut out as far as stick
clicks and chatter and stuff like that. One
interesting thing was, initially they wanted
'Talent Show' to fade out, but Matt really
wanted to use the whole extended ending
as there are some fun talking moments at
the end. Part of why it had to fade out is
because Paul Westerberg threw in some
Chuck Berry lyrics and it might have been
a rights or royalties issue.
But what happened was, Matt asked
for my thoughts on the mixes, and I really
thought they were great. I had one comment on 'Talent Show' because I felt it was
slightly different from the rest of the mixes,
and when he went back and made that
correction, he muted the Chuck Berry lyrics,
which of course then allowed us to keep the
whole ending just as Matt wanted it.

Did you alter your approach
from song to song, or did you
have a set chain?
On the Matt Wallace remixes, The
Dangerous Music Compressor ended up

being the most used piece, but I really
didn't do much actual compression with
it-it just adds a little of the flavor of the
actual unit, catching some of the loud
peaks-what I really use it for is makeup
gain. About 6 1/2dB of gain just to feed
into the converter nicely.

Do you have favorite plugins that
you use in the box?
Yeah. FabFilter Pro-MB and FabFilter
Pro-Q3 are excellent.

Everybody mentions that plugin,
I gotta get that.
It sounds great, it's very stable, and its
visual feedback is terrific. Even though I
have the hardware, the Dangerous BAX
EQ plugin is actually very good-sometimes I'll throw it on at the beginning of the
software chain. oeksound soothe is a nice
high frequency tamer. It's very fast, and the
threshold is automatically adaptive. I like
the de-esser in the Softube Weiss DS1-MK3
plugin. I use that in mid/side mode quite a
bit before going analog, and Goodhertz
Midside is another useful plugin if I need
to do any mono-ing of the low end. Their
Good Dither plugin is nice as well.

that emulates a cassette tape, to slightly lo-fi
the reel-to-reel tape, and it worked. I even
forgot where the splice point is!

Did Bob or Rhino have a lot of
changes? Was there a ton of
back-and-forth?
They were pleased with the sonics, and
most of the changes were about sequencing stuff, fades, or where they wanted
between-song chatter, especially with the
Tom Waits stuff. My goal was to make it
stand the test of time and not need to be
remastered again in 10 years.

I know you're a big Replacements
fan. Did you have some nice fanboy moments when you first put
these tracks up for remixing?
Yes, it was a weird feeling to get the files
and pull them up for the first time. But with
Matt's mixes, we had a tight deadline for
the vinyl lacquers, so that helped me focus
on the work. When I get the whole box set
in the mail, that's probably when it'll hit me!

Well, thanks, man.
No problem. Thanks for the interview.

When we were talking a couple
of weeks ago, you mentioned a
track that was quite problematic.
The Tom Waits stuff. Bob Mehr had
those tapes transferred to digital at Ardent
in Memphis. I don't know the nature of the
recordings, but the transfer was from stereo
reels of the band playing with Tom Waits.
There was one song in particular, 'Lowdown
Monkey Blues', on the reels of tape that Bob
had transferred, where the full song was not
on the nice sounding reel of tape that all of
the other Tom Waits stuff was on.
Then, sometime in the 2000s when Paul
Westerberg was in his basement phase,
he released a thing called 49 Minutes. It
was this controversial montage of stuff, and
somewhere in there was the missing part
of this Tom Waits session. In the notes I got
from Rhino it said, "Can you splice this?"
On paper, it seemed like no big deal. But
the problem was that the thing that Paul did
was off cassette tape I am guessing, and it
sounded a little warbly, and the pitch and
speed were a little bit different. So, I had to
marry those two basically. I found a place
to make the splice, and I had to enhance the
sound of the cassette tape, but I also used
a Goodhertz plugin called Wow Control,

BOB MEHR
----- Interview by Paul Vnuk Jr.
Bob co-produced the Dead Man's Pop
box set. Author of Trouble Boys: The
True Story of The Replacements (2016),
Bob's decade of research logically led
to his becoming the band's archivist,
with close connections to band members, management, and Rhino Records.
RECORDING October 2019

27
Recording - October 2019

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