Pop Punk remake of "Taste" by Sabrina Carpenter

When remaking this song into a pop punk track, I didn't think the arrangement needed to change that much. It was mainly the focal instruments of the track should be changed. The drums had to be hitting hard, very forward in the mix, and guitars should lead with power chords.

One of the instruments that stayed similar to the original is the bass line. The bass line in that track, although subtle, is an essential element for the groove. So I started with it. the bass is running through 2 different channels. One is a clean amp bass sound, the other is a fuzz bass sound with a HPF. In order to clean up the bass track, I did some cuts on the track itself.

BASS TRACK CUTS

After that, to complement the bass track it was time to add the drums. The pattern was the same as the original, but resampled all the drums and made them sound heavier. For modern Pop Punk drums, it's important to find the balance between the hard rock hitting drums, and the pop samples. I used my Nord Drums 3P to create a snare sample to overlay over the acoustic drums. The main goal with the sample for the snare was to give more of that electronic noise of electronic snare. By using my Nord Drum 3P to create the sample myself, I've got a lot control over the decay, pitch and sound of the noise. To finalise the layering of the sample, I pitched up the sample to match the fundamental frequency of the acoustic snare, and did some phase corrections. I then ran all this through a snare bus and had it sound like I wanted. On my drum bus, for pop punk tracks I like running it through a parallel compressor first. The goal of the compressor is glue together all my drum sounds, and in order to not loose the transients, I mix the dry/wet signal on the compression. Usually at a 70% dry to 30% wet. After the compression, I run a tube saturation plug in, the Black Box HG-2MS. This saturation can had more grittiness to the drums, which will make them sound more lively. It will also help control the peaks, and by adding more harmonics to the sound, make them sound louder. At the end of the drum bus chain I've added another compressor just to add a final glue to the sound, the drums are sounding consistently loud and impactful.

It was now time to work on the guitars. The arrangement I came up with was to have Guitar 1 playing lower standard power chords, and Guitar 2 playing a higher line following the chords but sometimes adding different progressions to keep it interesting. I wanted these guitars to super crunchy and dry. They should feel close to the listener. But very wide, so the guitars were doubled and then hard panned L/R. On the bus channel of these guitars, I've simply added a warm tape saturator, the Saturn 2, and they were sounding like how I wanted. The guitar playing the lead after the chorus has a very different sound design. I'm running a chain with a distorted guitar signal and a chorus guitar signal mixed together, intro a hall lush reverb.

LEAD GUITAR SOUND DESIGN

It was time to add the synths. The goal is to add a layer of synths that complements the focal instruments of the production. When producing Pop Punk, its easy to let the synths take over the track, and then you lose the raw feeling that guitars and acoustic drums give to the tracks. All my synth sounds for this production are from Omnisphere. The first synth was a simple plucky chord synth. It's groovy, short, and interesting. It doesn't change at all. I've added some slap back reverb to give it some more groove, some slight reverb to push it back in the mix. After that I wanted a synth that could layer with the guitars. My guitar had lots of information on the 1.5k to 3k range, so my synth had to be a bit warmer. It simply follows the guitar chord arrangement and it can go unnoticed. I then felt the need to add a synth that would help punctuate some ear candy moments. Since the guitars have a little break when this synth comes in, it had to be something more on the upper mid frequency range. The last selection of synths was something to layer with the lead guitar. Most of the time I apply a LCF to mu guitars, I'm not a fan of the edgy sound of electric guitar on the high frequency spectrum. I chose a synth that has lots of information in that range in order to help add more air to my lead guitar. After that, I've also layer some simple bells to give a bit more body to the lead guitar and help it punch through the mix.