I remixed Black Sabbath’s 1983 album ‘Born Again’!

 

 

This post will be about something completely different, absolutely unrelated to art, illustration, dinosaurs, paleontology or the visual arts. Time for some music! Time for some heavy metal!

I'm a music fan and audio enthusiast (NOT an “audiophile” though), and always enjoyed tweaking my favorite music recordings to make them sound as good to me as possible, even back in the analog days when I was very careful of the type & brand of blank cassettes I bought to record my music from vinyl records & CDs, paid attention to volume levels on the VU meters while recording, cleaned my records before and after every play, etc.

Since I've had access to digital technology, relatively powerful PCs and proper software, I've often made my own tweaks ("remasters") to those recordings that I thought needed them for me to get the most enjoyment out of them. Usually light equalization tweaks, compression/limiting, harmonics, narrowing the stereo image on 1960s recordings for headphone listening, etc.

I recently went one step further and started playing around with Demucs, a free and open source stem separation program, to "de-mix" commercial recordings and get stem instrumental & vocal tracks to make my own, re-balanced mixes using Audacity as my audio editor of choice. Stem separation tools available to non-professionals are obviously far from perfect at this point, but still pretty impressive, perfectly usable for remixing, and a lot of fun.

My first choice for remixing was the first 6 albums by Black Sabbath, which I always thought could benefit from an extra oomph, especially on the drums. After a ton of work learning the new (for me) tool, lots of fun & frustration, starting over a handful of times and a ton of repeated listening, I'm pretty happy with the results, which in my opinion have a more balanced and punchy sound.

I'm in the process of uploading the remixes to YouTube, and they seem to stay online without being blocked by the copyright holders. I just get a warning that I can't monetize content that uses copyrighted material, which is fine and expected. This is all for fun after all.

After those 6 Ozzy-era Sabbath albums, I went for my greatest challenge to date: remixing their 1983 album “Born Again”, with Ian Gillan as their vocalist, infamous for sounding absolutely awful. Apparently, in the final stages of production, someone inadvertently blew a couple of tweeters on the recording studio's speaker system, and engineer Robin Black made the final mix unknowingly using faulty equipment. True or not, the released mix manages to sound muddy and harsh at the same time, and it prevents me from listening more to what is an otherwise decent heavy metal album. Gillan said the rough mixes sounded great, which means the record was indeed recorded properly and then someone messed up during mixing. That gives me hope for a pristine sounding remix in the near future. Guitarist Tony Iommi said in 2021 that he had finally found the original multi-track tapes, which were believed to be lost for years, and announced that a proper remix of the album was in the works. Like many other Sabbath fans, I'm eagerly awaiting for that fully remixed version… but it’s 2025 now and still no announcement about a proper release has been made.

So I decided to make my own remix! I want to make clear that in no way do I think I "fixed" this album. Like every Sabbath fan knows, this record in its released form is sonically FRIED (even after de-mixing), and I don't think it can be totally "fixed" using the original mix as the source. And if it actually can, it definitely goes way beyond my skill set and the technology I have available to me right now.

BUT I think I managed to make it sound a bit less muddy, with better instrument separation (that was HARD, and on some passages seemed impossible) and more overall clarity on the instruments and vocals. I'm sure it can be done better by someone more talented & skilled, but for the time being, I’m happy enough with what I got, even if some of its original harshness still remains.

Well then, here it is! A YouTube playlist with my full album remix of Black Sabbath’s ‘Born Again’.

BLACK SABBATH - Born Again (2025 Fan Remix) 

All opinions and criticism welcome!

Just keep in mind that I made this for my own personal enjoyment. I am just sharing it in case someone else might get some joy out of it too. I can understand people not liking a remix at all. Just please save the comments like "you ruined this record for me". No, I didn't. I did it for myself, not for you, but I'm sharing anyway. The original mix remains untouched. You can just ignore mine if it offends you in any way. I didn't "paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa", that comparison is getting tired.

I will be posting the rest of my Black Sabbath album remixes in the next few days, so stay tuned if this is something you’re interested in.

Cheers! :)