9. Six bootlegging tactics for chopping up a track

1 If you’ve found a wicked vocal snip, but there’s percussion or other unwanted sound mixed with it, blend it in by adjusting the volume until it sits well with your track, then use some simple lowand high-pass filtering to shift focus to the vocal. A sneaky EQ boost at 3-5kHz can also bring out the vocal more without exciting other sounds in the sample. 2 Turning a one-dimensional, thin riff into a full-frequency monster is a great remixing hack. Make a copy of your riff sample, then pitch it down by

12 semitones. Some low-pass filtering and tape saturation will turn it into a thick bass layer. Making another copy of the original sound that’s pitched up 12 semitones with a slathering of effects will add a crisp high layer. 3 Slicing and dicing up a track when bootlegging can require some compromises to make the track fit in your chosen style. Patchy-sounding edits, clicks, pops and distortion from excessive timestretching are all par for the course. Normally we’d edit out these imperfections, but why not make a feature out of them? Doing this can give your bootleg a cut-up, lo-fi, sampled flavour. 4 A killer move for getting creative with a bootleg is to slice a loop of the song up into individual hits using a drum pad sampler such as Ableton Live 9’s Drum Rack. After this, jam out a new groove by resequencing the slices live using a MIDI controller. To blend obvious gaps caused by slicing, send the channel to a subtle delay or reverb. 5 Adding your own sounds that layer over and mask parts of the track you’re bootlegging can be a great way of blending the original samples into your own production, while giving the whole piece a thicker, fuller sound. This trick’s particularly good for adding a modern, glossy feel to old recordings without losing the original timbre. 6 Clever EQ and volume automation chops can be a winner for making a full drum or percussion loop fit into your track. For example, you could chop a break’s kick drum out onto another channel and roll the low frequencies off to retain the loop’s tone and feel, while making space in the mix for your own lowfrequency sounds to shine through.