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3. Creative stockpiling to enhance your remixing workflow
1 A great remixing technique is to create your own custom ‘remix pack’ by editing and processing the remix stems before you begin writing the remix. You could look at this as mining for samples. Here, we’ll work through the track and export some audio to create our own custom sample pack. We’ll load the stems from the CM-80 Stems folder into a 119bpm session. 2 If you’re fortunate enough to have been supplied with the effects on separate channels, this is a good place to start looking for interesting sounds. Solo the FX Reverb 2 channel and have a listen. If we loop bars 71-72, it has a percussive start and heavily reverbed tail, so it could be useful for creative sound design later. Highlight the section and export the audio to a new folder on your hard drive. 3 Locate the Piano track, solo it and loop bars 33-34. Here we have a defined piano chord, which could work well as a stab. The piano recording could use a little more body, so we’ll beef things up by dropping in D16’s Frontier limiter. Lower the Threshold to around -20dB to squash the hit, and move the Output dial to -5dB to relevel. Now export this loop to the sample folder. 4 You can find new sonic combinations by soloing more than one channel at a time. We’ll solo the Chorus Arp and Vocal Hums channels, loop two beats of bar 97 and then drop a distortion on the Chorus Arp channel to add grit. Again, export this to your dedicated folder, then work through other sounds in the project to build up a library of sounds. 5 This technique is also an excellent way of creating unique FX and transitional sounds. Solo the Orch Stab channel at bar 105, then drop an instance of PSP cmDelay onto the channel and select the Double Ping-Pong preset. Next, drop in a reverb. We’re using the default patch in Valhalla VintageVerb, but any reverb with a decay of around 4 seconds will work fine. 6 Highlight bars 105-109, so we don’t cut off the reverb tail, then export this new FX sound to the sample folder. You can also try chaining up lots of different effects to really mangle your audio. Carry on designing interesting sounds and fill up that sample folder for plenty of ammo that can be used at the writing stage.