making a remix

two bars of the song repeated ad infinitum pitched up to 160bpm with a distorted kick underneath. add distortion to taste.

this would be a good question for I Make Music?

oops yeah sorry i was just going to come on and say that
(could an admin shift it it over there?)

pc user, and turn master volume up 6db and voila nu ed banger smashshit

i use an excellent program called Renoise which looks much scary than it is. been doing remixes with it for about 3 or 4 years now and i can't recommend it enough

'scarier' even

ed banger's bangers are slower than that

there's a good piece by claude von stroke about doing a remix here (and scroll down)

as for how i go about doing it. firstly, and most importantly, i have to like or hear something i like in the original before i'll do it. i probably only take on 1 in 4 of the things i get offered. then i try to make something i'd play in my own dj sets (although oddly, i rarely play any of my own remixes as i'm probably sick of hearing them by the time i finish).

as for the process. i work VERY slowly and i also work with an old friend of mine. i didn't used to but i wanted to step up the quality of the actual production and he has far better production ears and a much better studio than i do (my ears have been impaired by too many years djing!). so, to start off i go through every single part of the original deciding what i want to keep. quite often this will involve enormous amounts of time getting everything quantised as a lot of the mixes i take on are live bands and thus not "in time". i'll then build an arrangement using the parts of the original i like that will work on the dancefloor. i guess i'm pretty old school when it comes to remixing as i try to keep it recognisably the same song but reworked for the club. then i'll usually add new drums and a load of other parts and mess about with those for a few of days until i have something that sounds like it is working. i mainly use hardware synths although i do use some soft synths and use battery quite a lot for the basic drum tracks and then use heavily processed samples for other drum sounds. i do everything in ableton and then the final mix is done in logic.

then i yousend all that to my partner who tidies it up and might lose some of my parts and add some others and he'll put a final "sheen" on it and we'll bounce it back and forward until we're both happy. sometimes the end result is pretty much exactly what i sent him, sometimes he'll completely rework it, particularly if i have disappeared up my own behind with it. i actually love working this way where we never actually meet up and (so far) have no disagreements.

the only time we meet up is to hear what it sounds like at the club as i always road test the mix once before submitting it as it's great to be able to really see how it works with a crowd and hear how it sounds on a club system. after that well make some final tweaks and i'll maybe do a final edit of it. we usually require at least three weeks to do a remix and will rarely take on more than one a month. i think we've done about 12 this year though some won't come out for eons and some (particularly if it was done for major will probably never see the light of day).

oh wow i didnt realise you still wrote on ilx, thanks a lot thats really interesting! are you able to leak the unreleased remixes if the label decides not to use them or is this verboten?

another question: do remixers usually have their own bank of drum sounds? i notice the rex the dog has that trademark drum hit sound in most of his mixes - is this just a quirk of his own or is a common thing? and where do these drum sounds come from and simiarly do remixers generally use their own set of synth sounds too?

who is stirmonster?

JD Twitch of Optimo.

Remixers?! More like FAKEmixers!!!

(answer: Audacity)

also going back to what twitch said what does logic do to the track? why can't ableton do the nec EQ adjustments to make it sound ok?

ableton certainly can make it sound ok but ok is never good enough. i just find that sometimes the overall sound of ableton is lacking a certain something while logic offers better compression, limiting, eq'ing, finalising and overall mastering possibilities.

that piece from claude and your comments were GREAT JD, thanks very much

inspired me to pretend i have enough free time for remixing