If you just want to hear the final recording, here it is. Thank you for checking this out!

The Spark

This past semester, I had the pleasure of taking COM 306: Audio Media as an introduction course to Pro Tools and audio. Throughout the semester, we covered audio fundamentals, the basics of Pro Tools, sound for film and radio, mixing, MIDI, and so much more. The final project in the class was to make a voco-centric mix of at least 4 tracks and it had to be 4-10 minutes long.

The inspiration for my project came from the YouTube channel AudioHaze. He has a video series called Forensic Productions where he dives deep into a song and tries to recreate it as accurately as possible in a home studio environment. I fell in love with this series and decided I wanted to do my own recreation of a song that I love to gain a deeper appreciation of what it took to put the song together.

My track of choice was “Renegade”, by Big Red Machine and Taylor Swift. I have been a Taylor Swift fan my whole life and, in my opinion, this is the era of some of her strongest works to date. I loved the warmth and energy of the original record and I was confident I could recreate it using only the resources I had available to me.

The Original Recording

Taylor Swift’s folk era over the pandemic saw her frequently collaborate with Jack Antonoff (of Bleachers and Fun) and, more pertinently, Aaron Dessner (of The National). This trio was the creative driving force of Swift’s 2020 Album of the Year winning project, folklore, and its younger sister, evermore.

Dessner also spent much of the pandemic collaborating with folk legend Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) on their passion project band, Big Red Machine. Fans of Swift will know Vernon was also featured on the both the track “exile” off of folklore, and the title track of evermore. This duo would call upon Swift again in 2021 to collaborate on the tracks “Birch” and “Renegade”. These tracks would end up on Big Red Machine’s album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. “Renegade” ended up being the fan favorite of the two and is the song I chose to explore for this project.

Due to the nature of the pandemic, the original project was recorded by the three musicians at their own studios. Swift’s vocals were recorded at her aptly named “Kitty Committee” home studio, Vernon’s vocals were recorded at his “April Base” studio, and the rest seems to have been recorded by Dessner at his iconic “Long Pond Studio”. The characteristic sound of the original likely comes from multi-thousand-dollar analog synthesizers and drum machines, a full sized grand piano, acoustic and electric guitars, and either drum samples or a live drum set (I can’t quite tell). With this project, I aimed to recreate the warmth and magic of the original recording, using only the gear and friends I had at hand which means we used a lot of digital instruments and plugins to emulate the sound and characteristics of this great track.

The Recording Process

Through my University, I am fortunate to have access to a recording space with professional quality equipment that I was able to use for this project. Without a doubt, the most helpful plugin for this whole project was Xpand!2. It is a plugin that came free with my Pro Tools license and ended up being the saving grace for emulating synths, bass, and even drums on the track.

Keys

From what I can gather, there are 2 different synth tones on the original record and both were recorded on analog synthesizers (the Sequential Prophet X and the iconic Mellotron). Using Xpand!2, I was able to stack several synths on top of one another to give me the exact tone I was looking for. The darker synth mostly consisted of a sawtooth wave sound and the brighter synth almost sounded like a flute to me so layering a synth flute tone in the mix ended up being surprisingly accurate to the original record. Much of the synth sound I achieved came from heavy amounts of compression. I used the Pro Tools stock compressor with its aggressive “Pump” preset which gave me a really cool, analog-sounding tone.

Considering that Long Pond Studios is home to a beautiful Yamaha grand piano, I think it is safe to assume that this was the piano used on the track. I was able to get a “good enough” approximation using MIDI and the Mini Grand Pro Tools plugin which is about the best I can do with what I had available to me for the project.

Guitars

Seeing as Aaron Dessner is a world-class guitarist and I still cannot play a barre chord to save my life, I called in my friend Owen who is a classical guitar major to record the guitar parts on the track. Dessner used one of his legendary guitars on the record but for my version, we are using the gear we have access to so the guitar part was recorded on an old Yamaha handed down from my grandfather (because apparently when you order a guitar player, they don’t always just come with a guitar? No idea why). By the suggestion of my professor, we recorded guitar using a combination of the school’s TLM 103 and my sE V7. The result is a folky-colored tone, almost reminiscent of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago which was a happy accident. The original record has an electric guitar in a few spots but I chose to omit it in my version, mostly due to not owning an electric guitar. I could have maybe tried to emulate the tone with MIDI or replaced the parts with a different instrument entirely, but I was happy with where I was and did not want the track to sound busy in a not-so-tasteful way.

Bass

I could not hear much bass on the original track so I picked the most uninteresting synth bass I could find and mixed it in until I was satisfied. This is definitely an area that can be improved upon but the bass is definitely not a focal point of the track so I think keeping it super simple worked out okay.

Drums

This was definitely the most challenging part of the recreation for me. The original recording has 2 different drum flavors: a hardware drum machine (likely Dessner’s TE OP-1) and what my professor says are chopped drum samples. I used the “Boom” drum machine plugin for the electronic drums and Xpand!2 for the acoustic drum sound. I tried my best to match the patterns with what I can hear but there is a tone of room for improvement. I think I could have found or recorded my own drum shots to, as I put it in my essay when I submitted my assignment, sound less “like a 7-year-old using Garage Band for the first time”.

Vocals

The more videos and articles I find about recording pop songs, the more people say vocals tend to be one of the easier parts of a project, despite being a focal point of the final mix; this was definitely the case for this record. I have been a member of the Rhody Rhapsodies a capella group for over 3 years so I am privileged to be friends with a surplus of amazingly talented vocalists and musicians. Seeing as Swift tends to record all of her lead vocals on Neumann condenser microphones (or Neumann clones), we recorded my Rhapsodies friend Lauren’s vocals on the Neumann TLM 103. Before she arrived at the studio, I was stressing out trying to figure out the different harmony parts in the choruses and post-choruses solely by ear so we could record all the parts we needed in the little time we had. Fortunately, one of the first things Lauren said when she arrived was “Are we gonna do the harmonies too? I love doing harmonies, and I am great at finding them.” Once we got going, it was smooth sailing from there and we were able to record all of Lauren’s lead vocals, doubles, and harmonies within the hour before Rhapsodies’ rehearsal.

For my background vocals, I opted to forgo the studio and record the parts back home. Justin Vernon, the frontman of Bon Iver, has a very iconic voice and a characteristic style that I hoped to emulate. The bands first project, For Emma, Forever Ago (which was a solo project by Vernon) was recorded solely on a Shure SM57 when Vernon exiled himself to a hunting cabin in the woods. Seeing as the SM57 is a dynamic microphone and Vernon can be seen using a dynamic mic for vocals in other recordings with Swift, I chose to use the sE V7 handheld dynamic microphone for my vocals on this project.

Recording yourself is always an eye opening experience and I am always a bit taken aback by the sound of my own voice. From others I have spoken to, I do not think this is a unique thing for me. What you hear in your own head is remarkably different from what comes through in playback. All of the little flaws your subconscious chooses to block out are just amplified and you are forced to confront them. I have heard this phenomena be compared to body dysmorphia but in a musical sense.

Getting over this, I am definitely not as good as Lauren at finding harmonies so Vernons part took some time to make out. I ended up doubling or tripling up on a lot of the parts to get the sound I wanted which is definitely something Vernon has done on a number of records; I think it turned out best in the outro of the song. The scariest part for me to record was the third chorus. Vernon has these super rich and distant background vocables that I tried my best to match it but after many takes (and singing parts definitely out of my vocal range), I will be the first to say I do not come close to anything Vernon recorded for the original track.

The Mix and Master

Since this was a class project, I only allowed myself to use plugins that came stock with Pro Tools or I got for free from the internet. My professor also taught us how important mixing in parallel as opposed to serial is throughout the whole semester so I made sure to do a fair bit of parallel processing. I had parallel sends for compression, reverb, delay, and even a separate parallel send for the vocals that could be further mixed in with the other parallel processors.

One plugin that was super helpful for lead vocals was Slate Digital’s Fresh Air. It is essentially a compression algorithm but with a super friendly interface that is designed to specifically add more “air” to an input in a super tasteful way. I have to imagine it is used by pop producers all the time to get that characteristic vocal tone.

I also found myself using a lot of band-pass filters in this project. On my vocals specifically, trimming a lot of the high and low ends helped me get the distant, hollow tone I was aiming for. Using EQ’s to change tones super drastically is definitely not something I am fully comfortable with and there are spots where I could be a lot more aggressive with my cuts.

We have not talked much about mastering in my audio class so my master chain is pretty barebones. I used the free mastering compressor TDR Kotelnikov to add some warmth and richness. From an AudioHaze track recreation of Bon Iver’s “Flume”, I learned that Bon Iver’s producer frequently uses a Pultec EQ plugin on the master chain so I used the Pro Tools included Pultec plugin to accentuate the focal points of my mix.

I think the most room for improvement comes in the form of automation. I am still not totally comfortable working with automation yet and I much prefer changing clip volumes or making a separate track to change the effects on a clip throughout a record. Automation would allow me to finely tune dynamics, pan sounds from left to right, change how distant or up front something sounds, and so much more.

The Final Product

Overall, I am happy with how the track recreation turned out. I think I match the style and feel of the original recording to the best of my ability with the resources available to me. If I was to do it again, I definitely would spend some more time with the drums. Using live drums, drum samples, or just having the insight of a drummer would be super helpful because there are definitely a bunch of details I missed from the original record. Out of the confines of a class project, I would also probably opt to use some different plug-ins. Dessner and recording engineer Jonathan Low likely used some more flavored compressors and reverbs on their record (they seem to be partial to soundtoys EchoBoy, FabFilter Saturn for saturation, and a Universal Audio 1176 emulator for compression). I also would choose to use some tuning plug-in if I had the means to in the future. Lauren’s vocals did not need any tuning but mine absolutely did and the sound of Auto-Tune is so popular nowadays that I think I would choose to use it even if it was not completely necessary.

Anyways, hopefully my ramblings have not scared too many people away. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to check this out; here is my my version of the Big Red Machine and Taylor Swift song, Renegade:

Track Photo by Samuel Gregg