Resurrecting Punk Rebel Renegade, Pt. 6

I just realized that I haven’t really explained what I’m actually doing to resurrect one of my favorite musical projects, Punk Rebel Renegade. It’s an album I originally recorded in 2011 with fairly primitive equipment. Despite that, it actually sounded pretty good. But for whatever reasons, revisiting these old recordings shows how far I’ve come as far as production goes.

The number one thing that’s giving me grief are all the plosives and sibilants in the vocal tracks. These are the harsh noises you get when you make a P, B, S, and T sounds, basically. I used 2 or 3 different microphones during the recording of Punk Rebel Renegade. I feel like I sometimes used a pop filter, but man, cleaning up all these imperfections is tedious. And if I had used a pop filter, there would be very little need to do what I’ve been doing. Simply put, I’m locating these unwanted sounds, cutting out some frequencies, and usually lowering the volume too. I’ve tried to automate the process as much as possible, but it’s still time-consuming. Years ago, apparently I didn’t notice sound issues like that, but I definitely do now.

Just like with the vocals, I was all over the place with how I recorded guitar and bass. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the production process a lot more difficult. And when I got a really bad sounding recording, did I re-record it? No. I EQ’d the crap out of it until it sounded somewhat decent. The guitar on “Let It Go” is a great example of that. The low end was so blown out and gross. But when you listen to the final song, it’s not like the guitar sounds awesome, but it’s a million times better sounding than the raw recording. So yeah, I used different guitars, different amps, different microphones, different effects, and different tunings. I feel like I got new strings during the recording process too, so that affected how the guitars sound too.

Another thing I’m doing whenever possible is cleaning up the drum tracks. The crash cymbal might be too loud, or maybe I want the toms to be louder now. I’m not adding or subtracting anything; that’s an important goal of mine. I want this remastered version of Punk Rebel Renegade to be simply that. I’ll admit I am doing some somewhat major editing to some of the songs just because certain parts would go on for too long, but I’m for sure not re-recording anything. Back to the drums though, some of the problems I have with them can’t really be helped. Back in 2011, I wasn’t concerned with having separate kick, snare, cymbal, etc. tracks. For most of the songs, all the drums are baked into just one track. Fortunately, I have the source MIDI tracks still, so I can make the proper changes and render them out again. But unfortunately, I do not have the original MIDI tracks for some songs. And for whatever reason, I only have an early version of the MIDI tracks. I realize my music isn’t so elaborate that I couldn’t go back and recreate those drum parts again, but that feels contrary to my mantra of keeping these songs original. It would be like re-recording the drums in a sense, and I don’t want to do that.

What else? For all the actual recorded stuff (vocals, guitar, and bass), I’ve been cleaning up background noise. This is kind of an embarrassing thing. Back in the day, I wouldn’t use headphones; I would have at least the drum track of a song playing over my computer speakers to sing or play along too. And sometimes that can be heard in the recordings. Sometimes it actually sounds cool, making the music sound bigger. But a lot of times it just sounds bad.

I’ve been listening to the album quite a bit in my car, at work, and basically everywhere possible to listen for changes I want to make. It’s kind of like what I was doing with Heat Stoke in December. I was done with the album for a while, and I just needed to get out of recording mode and into listening mode. What sounds good to you as you’re recording may not sound good to you as a listener a few months later. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been handwriting notes about songs. They’re usually notes about something being too loud or too quiet or a section going on for too long.

Speaking of sections going on for too long, here’s a rundown of the time differences between the 2011 version of Punk Rebel Renegade and the awesomely remastered 2015 version of Punk Rebel Renegade, track by track:

[table id=1 /]

I’ve been wanting to compare the track running times for a while now. I don’t know if it’s interesting to you to see the changes though. The 2015 times aren’t 100% official yet, but they’re not going to change much by the time you hear the songs. But as you can see, some songs have the exact same length, some are a few seconds shorter, and then a few are way shorter. “Pretty Little Ditty” is over 2 minutes shorter now, for example. When you listen to that song, you’re going to wonder how I got another 2 minutes out of it. “3:00 AM” is about 30 seconds shorter, which may not seem like a whole lot, but considering it was only 3:00 to begin with, it’s a pretty big cut. I almost didn’t shorten that one just because the original track time of 3:00 exactly was not a coincidence. But, like with “Pretty Little Ditty,” you’ll likely want to thank me for shortening it a little. “That Effing Door” is 45 seconds shorter now, thanks to Sead.

Alright, that’s enough babbling for now. I might be mere weeks away from release, so you should start to get excited. If you want. You don’t have to. But you can if you want.