Monthly Archives: April 2011

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Chronicles of a Remix: I’m Walkin’/Mary Mary – Day 8 (The Sendoff)

Sup crew…

I just finished the final base arrangement of the mix. Added a little track automation to the acappella track, as well as a jazzy guitar riff towards the end. I tend to like using a nice combination of a clean tone with just the right delay on it. Here’s a screenshot of the arrange window:

Leveraging technology today, for creative purposes. is really quite easy. As Bill commented on the last update post here, it allows worldwide collaboration no matter where the participants are, or what time of day (or night it is). Some of you know of the collaboration by me (DC), Todd Kelley (Cali), and Fave (Houston), namely Cross Country Collective.

Another thing that helps is to know the tools you’re working with. In this case, I use Logic Studio (Logic Pro 8), and Bill is using Logic Express 9. Same software but as usual, an “express: version of software usually has less functionality than a full version, but in this case, I put together the session such that he could import it into his version and nothing would be lost…pretty much the same process used for the C3 EP (with Todd and Fave using Logic Studio 9).

It’s off to Bill C in NYC…handle it, bruh! Stay tuned for the birth sometime this week.

peace,

::: oceans of rhythms :::
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Chronicles of a Remix: I’m Walkin’/Mary Mary – Day 7

Sup crew…

Below is a short video on the status of the remix. This is a collab between me and Bill Cammack.

In the last update, I had just started chopping up samples from the timestretched vocal acappella. Analyzing the acappella is where I always start. Knowing the BPM is always helps, but if that isn’t readily available, you could always import the original track and use Logic’s BPM counter to determine what that is. Here’s a video he did on beat mapping for this remix:

There are a few ways to timestretch an audio file. What I find easiest to do (without using any external plugins) is to use Logic’s Time and Pitch Machine. Once you know what the BPM is of the original audio file, you enter the new BPM, and let Time and Pitch Machine run the Complex algorithm selection to stretch (or sometimes called time compress) the audio to the BPM you want use. The Complex algorithm setting seems to work the best in dealing with any problems from any audio aliasing resulting from the time stretching.

From that point it was adding some other elements from my sample library and arranging how I wanted them to be. My thought, throughout, was to have the mix include some dynamics to it…in terms of audio effects, at minimum (after all, this IS a dance club remix). THe first thing was to incorporate some delay on the samples. This is pretty much where I ended up going, while keeping focus on how I wanted the drum track to be.

Fast forward to some back and forth discussions with Bill on FB, and a collaboration was born. Bill has a good working knowledge of just not Ultrabeat, but Logic in general. I sent him an mp3 snippet of what I had so far and we went to work on it! The video clip below gives a lil background on how it’s been going so far.

That it’s it for the moment…stay tuned.

::: oceans of rhythm :::

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Mint Condition – “7”: A review and sample flip

‘Sup crew…

Being the BIG MC fan that I am, I picked up “7” the day it dropped. I got it at Best Buy for the five bonus tracks all though REAL MC fans know that there are only 4 tracks (Cupid’s Hunt was released on the Walmart-only distribution of “Livin’ The Luxury Brown – Mint, you owe us a track! haha).

I’ve given the CD one listen through, and still assessing it in comparison to previous releases. Listening to it again, after I finish this post. Here‘s is a pretty decent review for you to check out.

So far, the only issue I have with the CD is that Shanachie, their new label, didn’t encode the tracks for CDDB, which means when inserting the CD into a computer with iTunes, the track data and artwork doesn’t automatically appear….#FAIL (hush Lis…:) )

On a separate note, I’ve been doing a lot of work in studio on my Akai MPC 1000, flippin’ samples and recording some tracks I may use in the future. Having a lot of fun re-learning the machine again, and plan to have it as an integral part of my gear setup.

A snippet of the track I did is below, done in all of ten minutes before I came into the office this morning. You’ll know the sample I flipped when u listen to the CD.

MCFlip

MC fans, pick up “7”, get the CD, don’t download the tracks which are already ALL over the net.

::: oceans of rhythm :::

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Chronicles of a Remix: I’m Walkin’/Mary Mary – Day 2

Day 2 – Ok, I have the first two tracks kickin’ off this tune. I know that at some point, I’ll probably chop the vocals up, and some track automation, etc. As mentioned in the audio clip above, I’m thinking of some specific vocal samples to add, if I can find them. For this version of the remix (I will probably do three max), I’ll maintain the original tempo.

I’m using a standard software Apple loop for the basis of the drum track, but may program my own at a later day…I’ll see how the overall track flows….

More later…

::: oceans of rhythm :::

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Chronicles of a Remix: I’m Walkin’/Mary Mary – Day 1

Hey…

Day 1. About to get started on this remix. I always begin my gathering all the audio stems for the foundation. As said in the audio clip above, that usually is at least the vocal accapellas and the instrumental, if need be. I’ve got the BPM so…it’s time get started.

Back soon.

::: oceans of rhythm :::

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Chronicles of a Remix: The Intro.

Greetings readers…

Hope all is well. The audio clip in this post much summarizes what this series is about, however, for those of you who can not listen to the audio, here we go.

This series is created out of a desire to share with you, a musically journey of creativity or deeper still, re-creativity. I’ve been a musician for over half my life and ever since I discovered the concept of “the remix”, I’ve been interested on the entire approach of taking an original song and birthing something new from it.

Though I’ve heard countless remixes in many genres over the years, I didn’t really become fascinated with it, until I heard certain artists/remixers take tunes from my favorite group, Incognito, and create remixes of their songs. What fascinated me was the particular style and approach of a handful of remixers (my favorites), who took the essence of the song in an ENTIRELY different direction, while creating an new sense of depth and width to the arrangement. All the genres that these remixes fell into were mostly of the house, chillout/downtempo, breakbeat, and jazzy hip-hop veins.

Who are some of my favorites? Jazzanova, Atjazz (Martin Iverson), Little Big Bee, Masters At Work, Ski Oakenfull, Mark de Clive-Lowe, MJ Cole, Roger Sanchez, Pete Rock, Just Blaze, Pepe Braddock, etc.

The first “official” remix I did was last year, fora track called “Granted” by Philip Clark. You can read about that here . So that being said, Chronicles of a Remix will be a behind the scenes look at everything I consider when doing a remix: the tools I use (hardware, software), my inspirations, my thoughts (large and small), the direction, etc. I will include some audio footage at any point in time: in studio, while I’m at work, en route somewhere, whatever. They’ll be sometimes where I’ll include some video footage as well. Don’t expect either types of footage to be polished to some great extent, as I prefer to give it to u as it comes, without any great post-production effort…I guess you can call it “keeping it real” (simple).

That’s about it. For those of you who are friends with me on FB and have paid any attention to the few comments I made over the last week, you may already know what the first remix project is (if you’ve heard the audio clip above, you know already).

Stay tuned for the first post in a day or two.

Have a great weekend

::: oceans of rhythm :::

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