OK, off we go again!
I finally completed my own remix of Alka’s Separate, when a few days ago I was sent a link by Fernando Fonseca to have a listen to what he was up to with his remix and to offer an opinion as to whether it needed vocals.
I am really impressed by what he’s put together.
Long and short of it is that we got talking about whether I’d be interested in mixing his remix. Fool that I am, I agreed!
Last night, I loaded the stems into Cubase and started to have a play around. I’ve worked on a supplementary bass part and I’m uploading a quick burst here, just a flavour of what I’ve got – it’s just a few bars of percs and bass, but gives a hint of where I want to take this.
Rather than the “drop” you’ll hear after the short soloed percussive break, it’ll almost certainly lift here (more drums!), but I do love the sub at this point.
As always, I’m uploading a tiny snippet to kick off the post. I really like looking back and listening to how the tracks evolve, so these are always great to hear once the finished piece has been mastered.
Mastered version
Separate – STRBX RMX by Half-BIT
Mastered by Pure Tone
Update: 20/10/2009
Should really listen to this again with fresh ears tomorrow before uploading, particularly as I did most of the mixing on the train. But what the heck! Let’s pop this version on the website now and if I need to remix or tinker in any other way, I can always come back to it over the next few days.
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Update: 15/10/2009
Train journey home allowed a bit more time to play around with the Half-BIT Mix. Really liking the way this is coming together, though clearly a way to go yet.
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Update: 12/10/2009
Still poorly so it’s laptop in bed (again) and a little bit more playing with The Half-BIT Mix.
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Update: 11/10/2009
Took @pure_tone’s advice and brought the laptop to bed to do a little more work on this track. Not taken it too much further as my head feels like ’tis full of cotton wool and I don’t want to have to undo lots of this later if it’s awful with proper ears.
Not an arrangement, nor a mix. Just some ideas. Some will stay, some will go.
Anyway, Tone was right. That killed an hour!
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First Upload: 07/10/2009
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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 (Jandía 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.
