Remix Post-Mortem

For the last 5 weeks or so I have been working on remixing the song "Get Free (ft. Amber Coffman)" by Major Lazer. To say it was hard work would be an understatement.

The remix was produced in Ableton Live which was completely new to me; before learning how to use it I swore by ProTools religiously. I had also had previous experience using Reaper and a bit of playing around in FL Studio, but learning how to use Ableton efficiently was very frustrating and definitely tested my patience, especially with getting used to doing quite simple things in Ableton that were just operated differently in ProTools; as simple as zooming in or scrolling left and right, or changing between different automation parameters.

I had also never attempted at making electronic music or even been interested in it until recently (being a guitar player I've always been into bands, not beats) so learning how to actually write a song and make it match the key of the original was pretty tricky... I have had a heap of experience programming pretty technical metal style songs at home though, so that was definitely an advantage I had, and I spent a lot of time making playlists on Soundcloud of producers that I drew inspiration from. This task has definitely got me right into dance music.

I am pretty happy with my result. For the first couple of weeks I spent many hours staring at the computer screen having no idea what to do, writing some drum beats or some synth melodies before thinking "that sounds stupid" and starting over. The thing that helped me the most was definitely just listening to music similar to this genre over and over. Examples: - UV Boi - If She, If He (what a tune)

- Boombox Cartel - B2U

After quite some time playing with some free and paid drum samples I downloaded at home and heaps of different Massive presets and synths that I made myself I started to get a pretty good idea of how I wanted the song to sound. I wanted to keep the laid-back summer vibes of the original song throughout two verses and use these sections of the song to build up to really bass heavy dance parts, or 'drops'. I used a sample of the original horn sound in "Get Free" to make a melody in the drops as well as Massive synths and 808 kicks and snares.

My failures in this task were definitely the overall mix, especially due to the fact most of it was done on my headphones, which have extremely flat frequency response, meaning that I cranked the bass so I could hear it, only to go home and have it absolutely destroy the speakers in my car (not literally). I also spent way more time at SAE working on this than I should have. The amount of hours I spent in Lab 2 should have resulted in a way better production. I also was very ignorant to the task requirements and did not realise until after I had fleshed out most of the song that I had to make my own synth patches and use midi effects so I had to go back and add some of those in, but I did rely quite a lot on massive presets with a bit of tweaking to the LFO's and performers.

Overall I am happy with my completed remix and can even say I enjoy it enough to listen to in my spare time. I also think I have greatly benefited from learning Ableton Live and it has definitely swayed me on my previous opinion that ProTools is king... If I were to do anything differently next time I would definitely spend a lot more time watching tutorials and learning how to effectively make synth patches so that all my sounds are completely unique.

It turns out that Soundcloud didn't like my remix very much; they even wrote to me telling me that it breached their copyright policy.. After a bit of searching I found that Yungcloud was a pretty close imitation of Soundcloud but caters for more underground music and seemed to be easy to use (I didn't want to spend much time signing up to a new music streaming website just to post one song..). But here it is.