Tim: Let It Bleed '85 Remaster (A personal remaster)
Beware: this is some recording nerd shit but I do have files I want to share down below. No need to read all this, but I wanted to back up why I did what I did.
I wanted to share a remaster I made of Tim, working from the 16-bit lossless master. The basic reason I made it is pretty simple: while I really appreciate Ed Stasium going back to the tapes and finally giving us a clear, full-sounding version of this record, the 2023 remix always felt to me like it was making aggressive EQ choices that weren't right (and based off some posts I've seen in the past few months, I'm clearly not alone in this thought). It fixed many of the obvious problems with the original mix, but in doing so I felt like some of the aggression, midrange crunch, and general messiness that makes The Replacements sound like The Replacements got lost.
I studied audio engineering in college and have done some work with local LA bands, but more importantly, The Replacements are my favorite band of all time. Like basically every Mats fan, I’ve always hated the original sound of Tim despite it being one of my favorite records ever. So I started wondering whether there might be a middle ground: something that retained the clarity and low-end information Stasium uncovered, but sounded more like an American indie/punk record actually made in 1985.
A few months ago, someone here posted an AI-stem remix of Tim, and weirdly it frustrated me even more; it proved to my ears that there was a much better-sounding record buried in these recordings (or at least, one that's more accurate to what was recorded in 85). Remixing was a great idea, but AI separation inevitably loses or alters sonic information. Without the actual multitracks, I basically gave up hope of hearing Tim the way I imagined it—until I started aggressively EQing and rebalancing the lossless Stasium mix instead. No AI separation, just manipulating the full-resolution stereo information already there. I was stunned by how far it could be pushed.
How I think Tim May Have Been Supposed to Sound
This is speculation, but I think the recording history gives us an important clue. Tim was recorded at Nicollet Studios in Minneapolis with engineer Steve Fjelstad. Look at Hüsker Dü around essentially the exact same period: New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, Tim, and Candy Apple Grey were all tracked at Nicollet with Fjelstad.
That engineer + studio combination matters. Listen to those Hüsker Dü records: Grant Hart’s drums are thin, hard, and aggressively bright. The cymbals are brittle and the snare is small. I think that’s part of how those records were captured. So when the same engineer, in the same studio, records Chris Mars on Tim, it’s reasonable to suspect that some of Tim’s famously thin, bright character was actually printed to tape.
My theory is that Tommy Ramone dealt with that inherently brittle sound by going insane with reverb. Underneath all that reverb, his basic tonal balance may actually be more faithful to the recording.
This is where I think Stasium’s remix goes wrong. He was confronted with the two complaints people have had for 40 years: Tim is too bright and has too much reverb. So he fixes them. But if Tim was recorded bright to begin with, fixing that creates a domino effect:
Drums: Stasium darkens them → they lose upper-mid aggression.
Guitars: Loud guitars now sound disproportionately bright against a darker rhythm section → guitars get buried.
Bass: The mix loses body → Tommy Stinson’s bass gets pushed forward to reconnect the rhythm section and guitars → the bass becomes the structural glue of the new mix.
The individual drums arguably sound much better, but changing their character changes what everything around them needs to do. The drums sound better individually, but the band sounds less like a band.
I discovered this almost accidentally. When I simply pushed the guitars up in Stasium’s mix, it sounded awful—not raw or punk, just wrong. But when I turned the bass up and tucked everything else beneath it, his mix suddenly worked. It just didn’t sound like a Replacements record anymore.
So I tried a different approach: keeping the low-end clarity Stasium uncovered, but moving the bass lower and rounder, giving the kick more physical weight, and restoring the midrange crunch to the guitars and vocals.
The result isn’t “audiophile,” but to my ears it sounds much more like an American punk/college-rock record made in 1985—more body, but with the instruments still allowed to step on each other, closer to early R.E.M. or Hüsker Dü.
TL;DR: I used the lossless Stasium mix as a source and aggressively re-EQ’d/rebalanced it to approximate what I think is the underlying character of the original recording: brighter and more aggressive drums, guitars back in the mids, bass deeper rather than dominating the mix, and less of the polished/audiophile separation of the 2023 remix.
I called it Tim (Let It Bleed ’85 Mix) because the goal was basically to master it the way a conventional American indie-rock record might have been mastered in 1985—not to make Tim sound modern, but to make it sound like a really good version of an album from its own time.
Anyway, here’s my attempt at making Tim sound like I feel it always should have. Enjoy!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12D6QgJioiw7H6SkNEzGy77r6gsHtrAdY?usp=sharing