9 modern remix tools

These DAW-specific remixbusting tactics will help you breeze through the clicks and get the job done in less time

ABLETON LIVE 9: AUDIO TO MIDI

Live 9’s excellent Audio To MIDI function lets you quickly and painlessly convert any musical samples – whether they’re bass, piano or guitar – into MIDI information that you can then use to layer virtual instruments over the original sounds to add your own flavour. You can extract monophonic information – great for simple bass or lead lines – or polyphonic multiple notes from chord samples. This technique can sometimes give slightly incorrect results, especially when working with complex polyphonic material, so you might need to make a few adjustments to the resulting MIDI that the process leads to. However, it’s still a massive timesaver compared to working out the notes or chords from scratch – particularly if you don’t have the music theory chops necessary to pull it off by ear.

LOGIC PRO X: TRACK STACKS

If you’re working on a large multitrack session in your DAW, it’s really easy for things to become disorganised, leaving you looking through heaps of channels just to find that pesky hi-hat you want to turn down. Apple’s solution to this problem is the excellent Track Stacks feature, introduced with Logic Pro X. This lets you organise associated tracks into an easy-to-manage, single subgroup that comes in two flavours: Folder Stacks store your selected tracks in a collapsible folder, which is great for keeping things organised; Summing Stacks go one step further, routing the audio output from each channel into a single bus which can be processed with effects – just like any other bus in Logic! Admittedly, though, Apple’s flagship DAW is late to the party on this one – other DAWs have offered this functionality for years!

INSTANT BOUNCE IN PLACE

Bouncing an audio part in place with processing applied is a simple-yeteffective timesaver that’s offered in one form or another by most DAWs. Not only is it a great way of quickly freeing up some CPU power in an overloaded project, but it also works well for printing short effect edits onto a stem, or creating differently processed variations – all without leaving the comfort of your arrange page. Many DAWs even let you use plugins directly on a single region of audio as well as the actual channel, which is great for quickly trying out effects without wasting time copying chunks of audio onto a separate track.

CUBASE PRO: CHORD PADS

Introduced with Cubase Pro 8, Chord Pads are an incredibly easy and useful option for instantly trying out fresh chord progressions over existing parts. You can assign different chords to each pad, with the Chord Picker and Chord Assistant helping those with less music theory knowledge pick additional chords that fit musically with the ones already chosen. Once you’ve chosen your chord combo, it’s simple to lay them down onto a MIDI/instrument track by hitting record in Cubase and jamming away to your heart’s content. You can assign the Chord Pads to a MIDI controller, a bonus being that you can also control modifiers such as transposition and voicing on the fly, making it a doddle to switch the playing pad to a minor or seventh chord and add an extra layer of musicality to your progression.

ABLETON LIVE 9: CHAIN SELECTOR

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to deal with your remix parts in Live, add individual chunks of said parts into a Sampler, then bundle the Sampler into an Instrument Rack. Once you’ve done this, you can assign Sampler’s Chain Selector to the Rack’s macro knob, then twist this to scan through the various sounds in a flash. You can even assign control of that macro to an encoder on your MIDI controller, facilitating rapid switching between the individual instruments, making it both easier and faster to find the sample that works in context. This is not only great for quickly switching between different sounds in the studio, and avoiding tedious browser auditioning, but is also a great hack if you’re using Live for any kind of live performance.

BITWIG STUDIO 2: IN-DAW MODULATION

One of Bitwig Studio’s incredibly useful features is its unified modulation capability. Every single control in both Bitwig’s built in plugins/synths and thirdparty AU/VSTs can be modulated using the built-in LFOs, envelopes and MIDI data such as velocity or mod wheel depth. This means, for example, that you can use a single modulator to modulate the filter on your chosen synth, as well as parameters on plugins you’ve used to process the synth. Bitwig’s modulation chops don’t end there, though – you can even use any audio or MIDI signal as a modulation source, which is ideal for taking the modulation of that cool bass you like from your remix parts and imposing it on any other sound in your project.

STRIP SILENCE

If you’ve just taken delivery of a full set of remix stems, it can be both laborious and time-consuming to remove the gaps in between sounds manually. Luckily, the majority of DAWs offer a nifty function to strip the silence out of audio files in one painless move – check your host’s manual to see how it’s done in yours. If your stems are from live recordings, you can adjust the threshold so that any sound under a certain volume level (say -30dB, for example) will be discarded, which is ideal for removing headphone spill from vocal takes or background amplifier noise from guitar parts, without losing any of the material you want to keep.

TRANSIENT TRICKS

This one’s not only a power move if you’re working with live recordings, but it also applies to the majority of popular DAW packages! In Logic Pro X, for example, you can easily trim the start of an audio file to the first transient by using the Trim Region Start to Next Transient function, while Pro Tools offers a useful Tab To Transient mode that makes chopping up transient-heavy material a breeze. Meanwhile, Cubase Pro 9 shows faint grey lines throughout audio clips to denote transients, with some handy keyboard shortcuts provided to allow quick navigation between them.

LOGIC PRO X: AUDIO TO SAMPLER

One of Logic’s less obvious features is its ability to add any audio files from your arrange page into the inbuilt EXS24 sampler, simply by selecting the region and hitting Convert To New Sampler Track from the Audio menu. You even have the option to slice your sound up into zones, using the transients as markers – ideal for quickly and painlessly slicing up drum breaks, bass guitar loops or other transient heavy material onto different keys in a similar way to Ableton Live’s Drum Rack. Meanwhile, if you’re a Cubase Pro user, the brand new Sampler Track offers the exact same function via the Audio menu.