Best way to remix a song.

[agent314]

It depends on artists, the situation, and what they're doing.

Example: I listen to the Disco Biscuits a lot, and I absolutely prefer their unmastered, average-quality audience recordings over their well-produced, professionally mixed and mastered albums.

For all the polish and precision on the records, it's a boring pile of well-produced shit compared to the sheer intensity and musical dynamism of the live stuff.

A perfect production with no soul is going to be boring, and a passionate performance of crappy quality is going to be hard to listen to.

Ideally you'll have both, but if I have to choose, I'll take a low-quality, emotionally authentic recording over a flawless-but-flat performance any day of the week.

[agent314]

Similarly, a touring folk-pop from Missoula, Montana happened to play at a coffeeshop near me a couple of months ago.

I recorded their performance with my Blue Mikey and my iPod Touch and also got the album.

The album is very well made, and certainly has both polish and charm, but the performance on the live recording is so much more natural and genuine, that I find myself listening to it easily twice as often as the record even though the quality is only so-so.

[rtengel]

When remixing I usually start with an acapella. www.acapellas4u.co.uk has got a lot of material. The quality varies by song. I warp the acapella and the original stereo master to match the new tempo and groove and then start layering on new sounds. Sometimes I borrow from the stereo master but not always.

Also, keep an eye out for remixing contests as companies/bands oftem make stems available to participants.

[OCDaveWilcox]

When remixing I usually start with an acapella. http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk has got a lot of material. The quality varies by song. I warp the acapella and the original stereo master to match the new tempo and groove and then start layering on new sounds. Sometimes I borrow from the stereo master but not always.

Also, keep an eye out for remixing contests as companies/bands oftem make stems available to participants.

I tried this one but failed hard. How the hell do you get the vocals to warp with no transients? Anyone have a guide or something?

[davepermen]

by creating the warpmarkers manually? yeah, quite a bit of work, but, that's what they're there for.

[Mike Hindle]

I have remixed a few tracks using only the original track without the parts before.

I have found some tracks will work and some wont, it's always good to have a section of the original track with just the bass, vocals, etc playing on their own without the drums. Thats the bit I usualy loop / chop up and create the remix with. Unfortunately there arn't that many tracks where the bass is playing without the drums over the top.

I managed to remix smoke rings by udachi @ jubilee this way, using a loop from the break and it turned out a treat, sent it to udachi and he liked it to.

I'd say the best thing to do is get the track warped, chop it all up into bits you want to use, play around with them over your beats and add eq and fx where needed. Seems to work for me hoevever nothing beats having the original parts to work with.

[Earwax69]

Well, yeah, a song doesnt need to be sonicaly perfect to work... exemples coming to mind? Beck One Foot in the Grave, the vaselines, Bogdan Raczynski stuff...

Im in somewhat lo-fi electro... I like my tracks medium rare please.

[simpli.cissimus]

as said, quality is unimportant. if you know how eels recorded his music, and how it sounds, and how great it is, then you knew what i ment.

and all he said is, if it's "just a bootleg", there's no need for expensive mastering.

oh, and, what we love about live performances is the humanity of it, means, the errors. and quality at a concert normally is much worse than listening at home in a perfect setup.

emotion >>>> quality.

Totally agree with you...!!!

Who cares if a song has very good quality when it's boring...!?!?

On the other side so many hits have been made in in bad or acceptable quality
in all the years since music gets recorded on any media.

Listen to the quality of hit's made in the 20's, 30's to the 60's.
Tell me you think they are bad, because they have no quality.

Really, if I like a track, I will listen to it in any quality it's made.
I may will wish it would have been in a better quality, but this is not
so important when it's a really good track.

[BoddAH]

no. i made a point that it is not always the goal to make a perfect production track. maybe it's just a suprise track for one evening, and you quickly mash something up. no need to pay 100ts to mastering studios to get it perfect. tons of other cases exist. eels never mastered anything, but was with an 8 track, sitting in a closet, while being in a one-room place near the airport. nothing of this screams quality, yet the tracks are loved and sound great.

if you create a bootleg, you don't have to go for biggest most perfect quality. you obviously do your best, but you don't pay others for their best.

but, you won't get it, anyways.

so none of the eels CD's are mastered? Thats b/s mate.

Good quality production is a plus but by no means it defines the music. Most of the best music ever made (in my opinion at least) was made 30 or more years ago, at a time when digital recording and DAWs didn't exist with recording gear that offers laughably poor performance by today's standards.

The "objective" production quality of these records by today's standards is terrible yet the music sure as hell isn’t.
In fact I'd take a background noise ridden and poorly mastered album by the Beatles or John Coltrane over some recent overproduced boring crap any day.

[crumhorn]

When remixing I usually start with an acapella. http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk has got a lot of material. The quality varies by song. I warp the acapella and the original stereo master to match the new tempo and groove and then start layering on new sounds. Sometimes I borrow from the stereo master but not always.

Also, keep an eye out for remixing contests as companies/bands oftem make stems available to participants.

I tried this one but failed hard. How the hell do you get the vocals to warp with no transients? Anyone have a guide or something?

If you have the original track or a drum stem etc you can warp that and then do a replace sample to apply the same warp markers to the vocal stem.

[lasersounds]

When remixing I usually start with an acapella. http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk has got a lot of material. The quality varies by song. I warp the acapella and the original stereo master to match the new tempo and groove and then start layering on new sounds. Sometimes I borrow from the stereo master but not always.

Also, keep an eye out for remixing contests as companies/bands oftem make stems available to participants.

I tried this one but failed hard. How the hell do you get the vocals to warp with no transients? Anyone have a guide or something?

put the acapella in ableton(session view?, this only works on one view and not the other), click unwarp, then play the track and tap on the tap button. take the master BPM, and type it in the track BPM. then click warp and adjust accordingly, because it wont be perfect but it'll be pretty close and will make it ALOT easier.