THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO REMIXING
Sitting down with a guitar or a computer and trying to create something from scratch can be one of the hardest things for a musician to do. Everyone has good days, of course, when the music flows easily. Other times though, the pressure we put on ourselves to write music can make things tougher. This isn’t as often the case with remixing, that long-established technique of re-interpreting and reworking music made by others to create something new and sometimes even radically different. When you remix, the building blocks are handed to you and it’s up to you to turn them into something. In a way, much of the legwork has already been done and all that’s left to you is to interpret it in your own style.
This is why remixing is so popular and why some people even prefer it to writing original music – although some remixes depart from their source material so radically that they could arguably be described as new compositions. As well as being great fun, some remixes even end up being more commercially successful than the original song.
Starting the remix
You might tentatively suggest that bands playing covers of other bands’ songs were the original remixers, but it wasn’t until the advent of electronic music that the concept of the remix properly entered popular consciousness. True, early hip hop sampled a lot of funk and disco records, and dub music in the 1970s blended a lot of instrumentals with new vocals, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. Official remixes really started to appear in the 1980s along with the rise of MIDI-capable equipment, early sequencers and 4/4 dance beats. These factors made syncing elements of different tracks together much simpler, and so remixing grew in popularity.
As the 90s gave way to the 2000s, computers and DAWs were becoming more powerful than anyone could have imagined in the 1980s. As it turns out, these are the perfect tools for remixing. There’s no loss of quality when swapping digital files, everything can be synced precisely, and virtual instruments mean a much wider sonic palette than had ever been possible before. With the rise of the internet, remixing was no longer even constrained by where you lived. It became big business, not just in the dance world but in pop too.
Getting remixes of a track can be a great way not just to pad out a single release but also to broaden the appeal of your music, to take a great acoustic song and translate it to the dancefloor, for example. If you are a remixer, re-imagining the tracks of other artists gives you great creative freedom and also the possibility of a payday if things go well. Remember, remixing doesn’t necessarily just mean sticking a 4/4 dance thud under something, even if that’s still common. With the tools available to you in almost any DAW, the sky is the limit when it comes to reworking tracks for a remix. We’ll show you how it all works over the following pages…
