How do they do it?

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

How do they do it?

Hello friends,

I have a question about a particular type of music production. One aspect of DJs i really like is when they can take a song and remix it so thoroughly that it sounds almost like a totally new track. Here are some examples
Treasure fingers walking on a dream remix,

or if you want some more power behind the sound check out some of SAVOYs track - what type of software and methods are used in remixing songs like this?

thanks!

2

That’s probably because remixes might only contain a snippet of the original and may well be almost completely a totally new track. You can remix a track one of 2 ways:

  • obtain the stems from the producer and use them to construct your remix
  • tease solo instruments and parts from the original track by sampling/EQing/phase cancelling/filtering them

…any DAW will allow you to do this. Personally, I think Ableton Live is quite helpful due to it’s easy warping functions.

3

It’s really that easy to get clips from producers?? I see remixes online allll the time there’s no way all those small djs can be contacting the producers for those.
I guess it would make sense that like Wolfgang gartner, porter, and other big named people would be able to but there are countless daft punk remixes online it doesn’t seem feasible that’s how they would get the sound clips

4

Some producers post the stems publicly (ie: Dada Life)

5

Oh that’s pretty sweet didn’t know that - does ableton allow you to pull out vocal samples and nix the music behind?

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If you mean separate the vocals from the instrumental, no. No DAW can separate cleanly an element from a mixed file. You could try some of the methods lethal posted before, depending on what you are after, these results will be good enough for you or not.

7

youtube is your friend man - there’s gazillions of instrumentals and acapellas on there to play with. It really doesn’t matter too much about the quality, as long as the bulk of the track is made up of original sounds.

to be honest, a successful remix takes a couple of key elements/stems of the original track and uses them as a focus for a new track. (IMO)

if you want to get hold of stems, i’m not sure if they’re still running as frequently but beatport used to run regular comps where you can buy the stems to a song and remix it (winning an official release and opening set for deadmau5 or something like that) - you’re unlikely to win straight away, but it’s a good way of getting stems to big tunes.

and as lethal said - i’d massively recommend ableton live for playing with samples. in my experience (bearing in mind i’ve settled with live for a while now) they make it so easy to stretch things out and chop up vocals.

bit of a shameless plug, but since it’s on my mind - i’ve been working on a track this afternoon, in which i took the mary j blige pella (ripped from the youtube vid below) and chopped and pitched it up - adding a bit of delay, compression and reverb.

https://soundcloud.com/belch/nu-start-riddim-clip

it’s not quite a remix, but that shows how you can do this and make it your own… and it really doesnt take that long once you get the hang of it.