I decided that a good way to get into music production would be to do a remix. I contacted a friend who had written a song with a bit of an electronica vibe to it about doing a remix of the song and he was happy to agree to it. He even volunteered to send me some files. To get started I ripped a copy of his song from a CD and loaded it into Audacity. The next thing I needed to do was to figure out the tempo of the song. Let's say a four beat measure is 1.845 seconds.
BPM = 4 beats /1.845 s x 60 s/min = 130 bpm.
The other way to do this is to load the sample into Reaper and modify the tempo until the song matches up with the measure lines in Reaper. This is probably the best time to do any time stretching to the entire file if you intend to change the original tempo of the song since the next step is to chop up individual pieces of the song to prepare for remixing. Changing the time often results in artifacts so its best not to do it if you don't have to. In this case I did not want to change the time. Both Audacity and Reaper have time stretch/pitch shift capabilities if you want to change the key or tempo of the song. I suggest auditioning them all to see which one sounds the best.
I did not need to make any real modifications in Audacity except to save it as a wav to a new directory that would hold all of the remix files for this song. I then went through the song and isolated different song sections. There was an intro with some reversed instrument sounds that lasted about a measure, the outro was nearly identical. There were a couple of two measure sections of groove. There were longer sections of verse and chorus. There was a short two measure instrument break with just the basic groove. There was a bridge for a few measures. There was an electric guitar solo at the end of the song for a few measures. I used Audacity to create a separate sample for each of these sections and saved them in the remix directory. In some cases I broke the section down to a single measure and in other cases I saved several measures. You can do some of this inside of Reaper but I wanted to have easy access to these files. When I get a little further I may ask my friend for a separate track with just the vocals, just non-percussion instruments, bass & kick and other percussion as separate tracks. Actually as long as I have vocals on a separate track compared to the other instruments I would be in pretty good shape.
I then opened up Reaper added a new track and loaded this song as a media file into the first track. The first thing I wanted to do with this track was to add a 808/909 kick to it. It had an acoustic sounding kick that was set far in the background so I wanted to spice up the kick for a dance groove. The first think I did was to apply an FFT based low shelf filter to filter the lows rolling off around 150 Hz down to zero. This took much of the bass from the keyboards and drums. This opened up some space for me to add the drum machine kick and the synth bass.
I really like the Dune software synthesizer plug-in. I have tried a few others but this one seems to have the best sound. For this type of work it is probably good to start with MIDI and a software synth. I can always go to MIDI analog synth later or record digital audio on an acoustic or analog electronic instrument later.
I first added a basic kick drum sound, with the intention of modifying it later to make it more complex (or simpler). I used Dune and MIDI to create the kick sound. I then copied the MIDI file to an identical file. I modifed the copied file to actually remove some of the drum beats. I used this as a small intro for the kick drum. I repeated copying and modifying the kick MIDI part to create some more drum variation through out the song.
I next added a bass part. I auditioned a variety of synth basses until I found one in Dune that I liked and worked with the song. I created a simple bass part to underscore the melody. I had to figure out what chords were in the song at this point. It turned out to be basically a Bb minor song. I added the bass notes using an Akai mpk mini. I then went into the MIDI file and quantized the notes manually. I then added some envelopes and applied one to the amplitude and the other to the filter cut-off so I could fade in the bass and sweep the filter during the part.
I thought the song could use a clap and I added this with Dune as well. I added an amplitude envelope to fade in the claps over time.
After the first chorus there was a single measure of groove before the next verse so I split the song sample at that point and added a few extra measures from the sample sections I had saved earlier.
In this part I added some strings. I auditioned a few different strings and although Dune has nice strings I went with Komplete elements strings that I had just bought and added the Guitar Rig Phasor from NI to achieve a phased string effect. I then played in a string part starting with a lower line then adding a second line about one octave higher. I copied the string phrase to a few different places throughout the song once I had a part that I liked. To get a good part I played back the song main line and improvised string harmonies along with it until I ended up with a nice sounding part. I added volume envelopes to the sound arranged the fading.
I had learned from reading some articles to always mix at a low volume. I find this technique works really well. You know you can almost always hear a part with the volume cranked but can you hear it at low volumes? When I do a mix I always turn the volume down to a low level and bring each instrument down until you can't really hear it then gradually bring it up until it sounds balanced. I do this with each different part one at a time. After I think I have a good mix I turn up the volume and verify that no parts need to be adjusted.
After this I saved a mix to disk brought it into Audacity and used Voxengo Elephant for compression (Master's punch) finally saving to MP3. I burned the original song and the new mix to CD so I could listen in my car. I have quite a bit of car time so I like to listen to mixes in the car. It also helps me understand if it is a good mix if it sounds good in a car with all of the traffic noise.
That's about as far as I have gotten in the remix process so far. Some of the next steps are to expand some of the other non vocal parts and add some solo synth instruments. I'm thinking of adding a more complex sound to the intro or possibly the outro. I may want to capture some of the original kick rhythm, use some extreme filtering or effects on some of the original tracks. I have to add some sweeps, ramps, splashes and rolls to improve the transitions.
The second aspect of remixing was to review some remixes that I liked. I read the Wikipedia entry on remixing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix and then found several of the suggested remixes on Youtube and listened to them so I could get a feel for the history of the remix. I also found a number of remixes in my song collection and listened to them to see how they handled it. I also listened to some of my favorite electronic artists to study how they put their songs together so I could use similar techniques.
Blog out,
Plasma Portal
