Resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade, Pt. 5

Nope. This isn’t going to be the last time you hear about me “resurrecting” Punk Rebel Renegade, my unsung 2011 album. If this is your first time hearing about it, Punk Rebel Renegade is an album I recorded about 4 years ago. I never really released it, but I was done with it by the end of August 2011. Since I never felt finished with it, it’s hard to say when the supposed sell date would have been. But I’m going to roll with August 30th, 2011.

You can read the past installments of Punk Rebel Renegade here. I’ll let you read up on what I’ve talked about so far if you haven’t already read it all.

. . .

Alright. So it’s next to impossible for me to recollect everything about how recording Punk Rebel Renegade went. But right now, as I’m currently having to listen back to all these songs, painstakingly, I’ve realized some things. Some of these things are pleasant and others…aren’t. It’s baffling how good a lot of this sounds considering how haphazardly I recorded everything.

Not that it’s a necessarily a bad thing, but I went against my original intentions with PRR. I wanted it to sound consistent and real. I suppose I succeeded with it being real sounding. The drums aren’t too fake sounding, and there are no synths or much post-production really. As much as possible, I tried to not rely on copying and pasting guitar and vocal takes. And, all things considered, I guess it sounds pretty consistent too. But I do know I used 2 or 3 different guitars, at least 2 different microphones, different amps, different guitar effects setups, different everything. The funny thing is that I wasn’t doing that to be all experimental or whatever; it was mostly just because I couldn’t remember how I was set up for a particular song. Since I was working on multiple songs at the same time, I wouldn’t remember which microphone I was using on each song, for example. So there are times when the sound of the vocals in one verse is different than another in the same song just because I was using a $20 Rock Band microphone in one and a pretty decent $100 mic in the other. It’s probably not that noticeable unless you’re listening to the vocal track soloed out though.

I don’t remember if I ever pointed this out or not, but if it wasn’t obvious by the title, this was to be my punk album. I don’t really know what makes punk music punk music, but this was my interpretation of it. Again, I stayed away from electronic dance beats or synth sounds. It’s all real guitar and all real bass guitar. The only thing that’s fake in it is the drums. And that’s something I never made a point of doing before or even after. Heat Stroke doesn’t have any real bass guitar in it, but there’s a smattering of synth across the album. With Punk Rebel Renegade, all the songs have a lot of guitar in them. It’s better in some songs than others, but every song is very guitar oriented.

I don’t know. I guess that’s what “punk” was to me. Well, then all the songs are kind of negative and rebellious or whatever. “Punk Rebel Renegade” has the most G-rated examples of that.

I’m a punk, rebel, renegade. Armed with a mothereffing hand grenade and a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade. The excitement doesn’t fade.

Then you have a song like “Gonna Kill You,” which, by the title you may guess is a little more to the point. And just looking at the song titles such as “Angry” and “Fake” and “Devilballs,” you can get an idea of the type of songs they are. Or…maybe not. I guess we’ll see when I barrage the Internet with links to listen to the album when it is released.

Oh yeah, that’s something I’ll mention because I don’t think I have already. Since Punk Rebel Renegade was sort of finished back in 2011, I’m not going to set a new release date for 2015. I want iTunes and Amazon and whoever else to label it as being a 2011 album. So there won’t be a global release date for it. Like with Heat Stroke, I’ll be able to control some of that myself. It’ll be up on Bandcamp and YouTube only when I want it to. But as far as other digital outlets go, I don’t really have any control over when they put them up. Beats still doesn’t have Heat Stroke up, by the way. Oh well.

Alright, I haven’t posted in a while, so there’s an update for you. It’s April 12th right now. I’m working a lot of overtime at work nowadays, so that’s the biggest reason for the lull in updates as well as a slowdown in progress with resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade. I have been putting a lot of time in it though. What I’ve been doing is listening to my rough mixes in my car and taking notes to make changes when I get home. Everything from notes about EQ to a fade going on too long or something being too loud or too quiet. Then I’ll make the changes and repeat the process. By the end of tonight, I should have all my most up-to-date versions rendered out. Then I’ll listen to them for the next few days or so and finally get them sent off for mastering. Yay.