The art of Remixing

A project I took up to allow my creativity to flow. There is a website named tracklib.com, a website that contains royalty free stems which you can download for a reasonable price, the one I picked was a track named "Uh Oh" by Josh Andres, having the stems, I used a DAW named "Ableton Live" to Remix it, here is what I did

Preperation

To Prepare I of course had a listen to the track, giving myself general ideas of how i could change it to fit a different style. a few things that ended up sticking out to me were the vocal track and the strings, feeling that i could use them in a faster paced version of the song. with a heavy focus on melodic synthesizers and simplistic drums.

Techniques Used

In the process of mixing, I used several different techniques that were not part of my typical skillset, going out of my comfortzone to complete the task adaquately. I will list those unique techniques.

Warping, something i used with every single track that was not midi in this project, allowing me to take an audio which is at a certain BPM (for example for these vocals, 164) and allow me to change the BPM of the session, which automatically warps the track to fit the new BPM, whether it makes it faster or slower, there are different settings, however the two main ones used were pro (for more melodic tracks) and beats (for drum tracks and percussion based tracks).

Auto Pan is a plugin, that as the title suggests, automatically pans that track, you can choose the amount, which changed how extreme the panning is (100 being from fully left to fully right, 0 being mono), the Rate which coincides with the BPM, it dictates how often it pans from left to right, those two are the most important settings, and the only ones i used.

This is Autotune, also known as Realtime pitch modulation, it allowed me to keep the Vocals at the same key as everything else consistently. those effects at the top not making all too much of a difference when adjusting slightly, just to make slight changes.

Sidechaining compression and gate, using this in a pad, allowing me to chain it towards a track, the one i picked being a completely silent drum track which plays a bass drum every quarter beat, allowing for the compressor and gate to dynamically activate to create an effect of the pad being a bit "bumpy"

Auto Filter is a plugin that lets me filter out a frequency range of my choosing, either keeping it still, or like autopan, keeping it moving back and forth to create a sweeping effect, i decided to simply keep it still, not taking away much, to only give it a slightly more unique sound without changing it far too much

In conclusion, these techniques were extremely fun to use, allowing my creative freedom to be fully shown off, even if at times these ideas didnt work out as intented, like the autotune, where it ended up sounding off tune, it's good practice, and allows me to strive to fix those mistakes next time i use these techniques.