For this blog post i’ll be talking about a recent remix I have just completed. I’ll be exploring the creative decisions that have been made as well as explore the process for creating it and the influences for it.
First and fore mostly the track that i remixed was called Hornted by a producer called Marshy.
Another resident of Melbourne, Marshy’s track is somewhat influenced by the sounds which have come to be recognised as the “Melbourne sound”. That mainly being the use of horns and off beat bass giving it a big room sound, minus the electro house influence of big room. However it is unique in that it is not a typical Melbourne sound track as it has clear influences from RnB and Hip Hop and psychedelic trance elements as well. it is essentially different to the other tracks which ascribe to this sound.
My remix of this track took shape upon hearing the deep horns within the track. I decided to take the track on a darker techno route and try and bring something different to it.
The basic creation of the track was done by finding the key after receiving the stems.
it was in G major. From there i worked on getting the drums right. For this I ‘rewired’ my main DAW FL studio into Ableton and recorded the drums as they played in FL.
As the drums were from a pre EQ’d and compressed session template I made, which i use for a lot of my tracks, it wasn’t necessary to change too much from them prior to recording. However they use delays on one of the kicks to add an illusion of a rolling baseline and sub bass tucked under the kicks to add more weight to them.
I then created a drum rack in Ableton using the 909 kit to add extra drums towards to end.
With those in place i began warping the samples i wanted from the track. that mainly being the bass and horn stabs.
Then i used massive in three instances to add an underlying pad as well as a rolling horn between 300-500hz to add to the illusion on pacing.
Thereafter i used analog and operator as it was a requirement to add some extra melody to the track by copying the note progression of the original.
Finally i used the VST AnA to add a stab. then i utilised an arppegiator to create a rising in octaves effect within the arp.
The effects used were again done in FL. however this time i did not wire it in. I bounced the track out as a .WAV and imported it into the program so as to use the simplified sampling function in the other program. after aligning my samples for effects i exported just those as a .WAV and put it into Ableton as a single audio track.
Then i processed the FX used within the original and added those where appropriate.
In all i feel it was a somewhat successful remix. however i would have liked to have made it longer. Also as this was my first time using Ableton to write a track it took me considerably longer write than i anticipated.
On the plus side though it was very interesting using my TB-3 as a keyboard to write most of the tracks and get a feel for using outboard equipment and synths to write as prior to this i had only worked in the box.
EQ work was also similar to my previous workflow as i had more than just the FL plugins to work with for EQ as Ableton recognised both its plugins but also all my Logic plugins as well. so i essentially had a larger database of vst’s to work with.
next blog post will be catching up with some that i have missed in my schedule.
Mittens 