When what you hear in your head you can recreate in the recording studio. Doesn’t happen every time, but last week I was feeling really nostalgic and listening to some of my favorite bands from my youth and I came close. I wanted to do a cover of a song that sounded like the band, but still sounded like me and still had some punch of modern recording techniques. 80’s music almost always=a lot of reverb and echo, sometimes the drums are buried in the mix etc. How do I get that sound but still not have is sound to dated? At one point while recording this song I almost went into complete 80’s reverb saturation, but not quite. So what do you do to get your song to sound like what you want and also throwing it back to an earlier time. The answer was pretty simple, I listened to the actual song I was covering from the 80’s and I also listened to songs I like the sound of from today or at least within the last few years. What modern music do I like and how did I get my song or mix to sound like that, but to also have that sound of the original song from the 80’s. It was that simple, I compared my song to the real song and some current modern songs from today while mixing in real time. The result was pretty close to what I wanted and something I was happy with.
What was the song. It was a pretty unknown song from a somewhat well known band from the mid 80’s, “The Outfield”. Below you can take a listen. I’ve also provided a link below the video if you want to download or stream it.
https://www.reverbnation.com/richbischoff/song/28532335-i-dont-need-her