Learn from everything – and also learn to apply your learnings when you remix!
I always look forward to a remix project. There’s something liberating about taking someone else’s music and re-shaping it. Maybe it’s because we take more liberties and change more things than we would with our own creations. It can be hard cutting out stuff that took hours of work.
First learning: MAYBE WE SHOULD!
So, onto the mix. We recently had the opportunity to work on a Japanese track from 25 years ago. Over the years, it had been re-released a few times and had totalled more than 50 million views on YouTube. Not bad!
The track was a hybrid rap/RnB track, mixing sung vocals and Japanese rap. Deep down, nothing spectacular there.
But when you go back 25 years, you also go back to a period when making music was very different. In this case, it became clear very quickly that the underlying music had been patched together pretty sloppily. The stems used generic drum samples and musical loops that were very clichéd and the bits didn’t really fit together. As our engineer said, “It was like it was put together by someone that wasn’t a musician”.
Ouch!
Quick question: are your tracks coherent sound-wise and harmonically?
Meanwhile, we had a vintage master on our hands. What to do? To simplify the discussion we had, we were faced with: uninspiring drum loops; clichéd music loops that didn’t really bring anything to the rest; some interesting vocals and rap sections in Japanese.
The obvious conclusion is that we should throw everything but the vocals out and start again. Although this could be exciting, we decided to pass. It would have meant starting a production almost from scratch and the deadline was way too tight to do that properly.
Couldn’t we just brighten the drums, add a new loop and knock a mix together?
I DON’T DO THAT ANY MORE! 😉
“Knocking a mix together” is not the way to build a reputation in the business – or at least, not the right reputation! Meanwhile, you are creating delays in your own productions. That can be frustrating for the people around you.
So although it would have been fun to work on Japanese vocals, we passed. Thanks for the offer, though!