‘How do I remix music?’ is a pretty common question. Taking your favourite song, analysing the mix and adding your creative stamp has a big appeal.
Remixing is a lot of fun, and is in fact quite a lucrative industry – but an extremely competitive one, too. Before you start making money from your sounds (if you ever do) you need to know how to create a remix – so I’m going to show you how. To remix music all you really need is a digital audio workstation (DAW) such as Cubase, Garageband or Logic, plus a bit of time and willingness to experiment.
Creating a remix is a very individualistic business. Everyone has their own approach, and I’m going to show you some of the remixing methods I use. Hopefully this will at least get you started.
If you do want to know more about the commercial side of this kind of music making, Sound On Sound magazine did an excellent article a couple of months ago. Definitely worth a read.
I am a big fan of remixing: I find it a lot less hassle to get creative and have a lot of fun with music if I already have a bit of material to start with. Remixing is basically about taking an original song, then making your own version of it by adding parts, taking parts away, chopping bits up or doing a whole bunch of other things.
I like to change the style and feel of a song completely; it’s always interesting what can of musical styles or alternative chord progressions you can extract from an existing track. It is also important to retain some elements of the original track, though. A successful remix is a balance between new and original material.
So how do you separate all the parts in the song I’m remixing?
Unfortunately you don’t. It is very rare that you can get hold of the original multi-track of a song, i.e. all the individual parts for drums, guitars, vocals etc. However, it’s pretty easy to get hold of just the vocals; tracks consisting of just the vocal line of a song are known as acapellas, and can be found all over the internet. Try acapellas4u.co.uk as a start. If you don’t fancy having to pay for an acapella (as you most often do) then just stick the original stereo file in your DAW and see what you can come up with.
It’s also possible to download a MIDI version of most commercial releases from sites like www.freemidi.org and www.mididb.com. This will basically give you MIDI versions of all the parts of the song. All you need to do is use whatever virtual instrument to play the parts and voila – a song. It’s then really simple to cut up the parts and mix up the structure of the original song, adding whatever parts you like as you go along.
So, to get stuck in with remixing, do the following:
1. Google for acapellas
2. Google for the MIDI file of your song
3. Stick them both in your DAW
4. Assign the MIDI parts to an instrument of your choosing
5. Chop and change as you please
6. Add any extra parts
And there you should have a fairly simple remix! Here’s an example of a remix using an acapella, with all the other parts created from scratch using a mixture of VST instruments, samples and a hardware synth.
Using the original song instead of acapellas
I actually quite like this method. It’s a lot simpler, but forces you to think a bit more creatively otherwise you’ll end up with quite an amateur end result. With no MIDI parts involved you’ll have to work out the tempo of the song yourself. Most DAWs have a tap-tempo feature, which will allow you to click along with the song and the computer will work out its tempo. If the song was not done to a click this will not work, and time-aligning is needed. I would imagine that if this is your first venture into remixing, you won’t be particularly interested in the very laborious and dull activity of time-aligning. If you are though, leave a comment on this blog and I’ll go through it all.
Right, so once you have your song and the right tempo set-up in your DAW it’s time to get remixing! It’s always best to have a plan, or at least an idea of a genre for your remix. It doesn’t necessarily have to be house or dance music, like 99% of remixes out there! I’m going to use the following as an example, which is a remix of the Radiohead song Videotape.
Have a listen to the original on YouTube for comparison.
Now as far as remixes go, this one’s pretty weird. All the methods and ideas used here can be applied to a more commercial song though. First off, the aims of this remix were to be a dark, electro version of the original, accentuating the musical climaxes and instrumental sections whilst retaining its musical structure. So basically to keep it all in the same order but make the instrumental bits a bit more interesting, and the climactic bits more climactic, so to speak.
Using the original track
The original song plays pretty much all the way through. However, it goes through a filter which is fiddled with throughout, making it much less obvious as the original track. The volume of it is automated, so in parts where I want the original to be a bit more obvious I bring up its volume. For other parts it sits back and lets the new material cut through.
I also used bits of the original piano at the start. All I did was cut out the chords that play on their own at the start of the piece, reverse them, then play them in the right order under the synth part at the beginning. The original rhythms of the hi-hats were also retained, playing in the background at various points.
Adding new parts
I pretty much just went to town with an analogue synth. I started with the basic arpeggio synth figure that follows the chord structure throughout the whole piece. Next I just added a bass line, which again just follows the chord structure. Then I made a nice, heavy kick drum sample with the synthesiser, and stuck that in at the start of every bar.
Once these basics were down, it was time to think about all the interesting bits on the top. First I tried to mimic the “Oohs” sung after the first verse using the synth, and ended up making them a bit higher and changing some of the notes. To add a bit more interest I stuck a new synth line over the top of that, too. Once the second verse had been sung it was time for the big finale – I spent quite a while thinking up ways to get a big drum beat into the ending, and programmed quite a few unsuccessful attempts using samples. I ended up using real drums which were then heavily edited to fit into the song, then heavily distorted and compressed, just to mash them up a bit.
I think it’s a great idea to combine real drums and samples – it adds an extra layer to the song, and I think makes it a bit more accessible. I added another synth playing the original arpeggio line and twiddled the knobs in real time to give some added effects, then stuck some high-pitched synth parts over the top. Reverb, EQ, compression and the like were then added to each track just to tidy it all up.
And that’s basically it! I kept the same chord structure but added a few synth parts and gave it a dramatic ending. The original was put through a filter to make it less obvious and there we have a slightly weird electronic remix of Radiohead’s Videotape.
My advice would be to have a good think about the original song you’re going to remix; think about what elements you want to keep, and what you want to add to it. You can use as much or as little of the original as you like, so long as you end up with a remix that’s unique to you, and has your creative stamp on it.
If you’ve got any questions about how to remix music, or you’d like to discuss mixes and remixes of your own, just add a comment and we’ll come back to you ASAP.
SoundShift is a professional recording studio in Potters Bar, just north of London. We offer a range of audio-related services at very reasonable prices, with friendly and highly experienced staff.
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