Dance Remixes and the like.

[Razor]

A question that will be obvious to some.

 

How do people do remixes of songs?

 

To be more specific;

 

1> You hear a song on the radio

2> Someone gets the song and remixes it completely, takes vocal line out of the song and puts it over a different song etc.

 

Where do they get the vocal line? Is there way of extracting it? Do they get it from the original artist?

 

I would like to know how they obtain the samples?

 

I dont do this style of writing, I am from the band side of things, but I am very interested to know how it is done if anyone could spare the time?

 

Thanks all.

[Darude]

With various tricks you can *sometimes* extract a vocal, or part of it, but it's really not that easy and the results are rarely "clean" and rarely as usable as getting the vocal (and/or other parts) as a separate audio file. That said, tons of bootlegs are being made by just pretty crudely editing and EQing stuff out of the original song, and that's often enough for club mixes, because if you do something in the same key and just make your remix/bootleg fit what you have, you can get decent results.

 

There are "finer" techniques like using EQ+phase cancellation (see here) to get rid of the kick, bass & (part of) snare for instance, but really mainly when you hear commercially released dance remixes of tracks originally in totally different genres, the original artist/producer and the record company have given the parts to the remixer, maybe even paid for the remix, either for the name of the producer, or for the new audience reached via this new genre'd mix, or a little bit of both.

 

 

One thing I've often done myself is pretty simple phase cancellation and you can often extract or remove at least something out of a full mix, and that might lead to a possibility cancel something else. In a long club mix that usually builds slowly part by part you could for instance have one part where the track has 1) vocals, bass, hihat, clap and kick, 2) one with just bass and 3) one with just kick and clap. If the music is made with something like Logic and is using the same loops or samples thru the track AND is not too heavily messed up by master compression and brickwall limiting, you line up those parts, make sure you have sample accurate match, then put a gain plug on one of them and reverse the phase of left and right channel. First have 1 & 3 play together and you'll end up with 4) vocals, bass, hihat. Now play 2 & 4 and you'll end up with 5) vocals and hihat, which is almost useable. Now you can try and find a single hihat on 1) copy and paste that on a track as many times as you have it on the 5) vocals and then phase cancel that from 5 to get a clean(-ish) vocal or you could try and find the loudest frequency of the hihat with Channel EQ and try reducing that out of 5, which might be sufficient.

 

I just noticed that this is difficult to explain in writing, so feel free to ask questions should some arise! I hope it makes at least some sense!

[Razor]

With various tricks...

 

Thanks for that!

It does follow the sort of thing I was thinking (roughly), for example with using phase shifting and similar things, but I hadn't thought of using multiple segments to 'blend' and isolate as you described.

 

It would be interesting to play around with but I think I would spend ages and not really achieve a good result as it sounds like you really need to have a handle on it to get even a passable result.

 

What made me think of asking in the first place was I have been asked now and then to extend a song for a wedding or something similar, and just thought it would be so much better being able to mix in a whole new section to extend the song rather than just beat matching and cutting and pasting segments in to lengthen it.

 

Anyway darudevil...much appreciated!

[Darude]

With various tricks...

to get even a passable result.

Sometimes it's the grit that makes that bootleg so great! Just food for thought...

[capt7]

there are alot of sites ( as well as some artists ) that have the acapella and instrumental versions of songs....you will have to google for the sites , cause I just google in certain artists when I wanna do a remix...than in logic if you want to change the temp of the song you can do that

[Razor]

Thanks!

 

I will do some googling and see what pops up.

 

[trancefuzion]

there are alot of sites ( as well as some artists ) that have the acapella and instrumental versions of songs....you will have to google for the sites , cause I just google in certain artists when I wanna do a remix...than in logic if you want to change the temp of the song you can do that

 

Nice tip! I didn't know that!