I guess it was the sun, sea and sand of a beautiful Spanish island which inspired me to try and turn a fabulous IDM track from Alka into a clubby groove, but that was my intention with this treatment of “Separate”.
With that in mind, I decided to name it the Jandía Mix after the small resort at the southern tip of Fuerte Ventura, where I was staying 10 days ago when this was put together.
Update: 7th October 2009
The shrill flute towards the end of this track and its incongruity with the rest of the piece has been niggling me since August. I love what Tone had done with the mastering and apart from that, was pretty happy with the track. Last week I could take no more so I opened up Cubase and played around with some different instruments. The flute has now gone and been replaced with a filter-tweaked lead synth patch from Ohm Force’s Symptohm, run through Audio Damage BigSeq2 with a little DaTube FX. Once done, I handed it back to Tone and he’s re-mastered compressing the track slightly to highlight some of the detail.
Separate (JandÃa Mix) by kieronjames
And here’s a link to the original track by Alka on Last.fm.
Note re first three comments below:
I did have an earlier problem with the lead synth at 3:28. There was pretty heavy modulation on the original track which (to my ears at least) bent it out of tune – not on the original, but on the remix – so I sought comments from a few trusted Twitter folks. Responses from @digitaldoyle, @digitube and @UBLF are shown below.
I tried tweaking the EQ at 3:28 as suggested but was convinced that the part was still out of tune, rather than just a harmonics issue so I ran the audio file through Cubase Pitch Correct to see how far it was “drifting”. After adjusting and readjusting for about an hour, I ended up deleting that part and writing three new lead synth lines. I’ve also done more work on the arrangement and mix and as ever, I’d love your feedback.
