Nirvana - Opinion (Sheep / Smart Studio Sessions mock-up)

This video imagines that in 1990, Nirvana decide to stay with Sub Pop for their second album, 'Sheep'. They have already recorded one batch of songs with producer Butch Vig at Smart Studios and return to finish off the album.

'Opinion' which debuted as a solo acoustic performance on the KAOS (FM) radio show has now been recorded as a full band version.
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I created this version as a long time Nirvana fan who would have loved to hear a studio recording on this song.

I used a combination of ‪@stevewelsh__‬ and ‪@ToBoddah‬ amazing covers as the basis of the instrumental. I cannot urge you enough to check out the rest of their work.

I used AI to recreate Kurt's vocal and I also used AI to create backing harmonies by Dave (in this timeline Dave would still have joined Nirvana as it was inevitable by this point).

While ideally I would liked to have worked on the instrumental myself recreating period appropriate amps and voice models, I decided not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

I layered the drums with a Steve Albini sampled drum kit, which while not true to the 1990 timeframe I felt was close enough. I used reverb impulse responses from Smart Studio and copied the EQ curve from the original Smart Studio sessions to help get a little bit closer.

Overall I aimed for a sound between the Smart Studio Sessions and the Devonshire mixes of Nevermind, leaning towards the latter as I believe that's where the overall sound would have went.

The album cover is an unused design from 'Muddy Banks of the Wishkah' by their legendary long term art director Robert Fisher (whose incredible work chronicling his time with Nirvana can be found on his Instagram account 'NirvanaBucket'). While it is doubtful that Nirvana and Robert Fisher would ever have met had they not signed to Geffen (meaning that Sub Pop art director Lisa Orth would have likely still been designing their covers), his work is such an integral part of Nirvana's visual identity that I decided to bend the timeline a bit to include him.

All intellectual property rights belong to Nirvana.