Advice on remixing a song?!

4 33 techno remix

one of my bands is supposed to be doing one soon as well. I've never even heard the band we're doing, and our main guy is thinking we should all 'contribute' to the remixing process, which sounds like a recipe for disaster/an ill-conceived mess-up.

Is it bad to want to re-record their original parts yourself, if you don't like their bass or something?

Haha!--that's what I was thinking!
I'm like, at what point does it become a cover?
Or what if we took bits of many of their songs?
I've def never heard of the band, I'm not sure I can even figure out how to remix it, since it's not like a dance track with a steady beat...

Bocken, we should trade songs. And yes, all contribute sounds scary.

see: mogwai "kicking a dead pig" remix collection for ideas.

when I remixed a whole song for a friend of mine I took the session tracks and chopped them all to bits, then built a couple of "drumkits" from the samples and played them back as individual notes to create a kind of layered pastiche. I used a single bass note from the original track to make a synth patch for my own bassline and then just fucked with the vocals a bit, arranged everything and voila. I didn't use any of my own patches or kits or anything, the whole mess was built from his session.

It was kind of a pain in the ass to get started, though, because kind of like your "client's" track I had no BPM to go off of, plus each track he sent me was all out of sync for start-end times.

Does anyone want to remix a tune of mine? I made a remix kit for someone else who it turns out can't do it, I'd just have to upload it again.

And if you do me then I'll do you.

I'll take a crack at it Jordan. use the webmail.

Does anyone want to remix a tune of mine?

Asking for someone to do this on ILX is sort of like asking to be punched in the teeth because it will feel so good when it's over and forgotten.

:(

Tombot--that's a good idea. Part of me wants to do a fun, maybe noisy, not really dance remix, but that's probably a FxYou to the band unless the remixer is really famous or the band is really noisy to begin with. The beat is all over the place as far as I can tell--from 143 down to like 130 or something... fun! :) can you post your song and the original?

Jordan, trust me, with the way we're going on our remix, you'd be much better off without one from us :)

I tried uploading the remix kit over the weekend, but my shitty laptop crashed at 98%. :(

And now that we've thru our first remixes, I've learned a few things, including:

1.) Unless you, the remixer, are superfamous, it's probably a good idea to use significant portions of the original song.

2.) Don't give the artist two remixes unless you're superfamous.

3.) For whatever reason, people initially expect, unless, again, you're Max Tundra doing Mogwai, that remixes are somewhat dancey or at least grainy, loop-based and "electronica"-y.

I'm sure I'm wrong and will have new lessons if we keep doing this. But phew. Remix iet HARD!

what's the best program for a beginner to use to make a remix with? i have the separate parts but i'd like to use some new synth sounds in there, and basically just chop up and shift about the other vocals. i've used ableton very briefly. ive been told acid 6 is best when starting, but it looks insanely complex when i start it up.