Your 4GB of FREE Construction Kits

This issue brings not only a raft of advice on how to remix, but also a bunch of fodder to help you do it for yourself. Of course, we can’t give away actual stems of copyrighted tracks, or use them in our tutorials, but we can make use of something bigger: 28 remix kits from some of the finest sample boutiques and construction kit makers in the world. All of these kits are royalty-free, so if you end up releasing something made with them or any element of them, there’s no extra admin.

These kits include stems and collections of musical elements that can be pieced together to make entire tracks. You might not have access to the stems from Number One hit singles, but with the stems contained in these packs, you can simulate the feeling of combing through a finished, mixed track for inspiration, as in the tutorial below.

The construction kits found within the kits are collections of elements only – these ‘packs’ can give you the experience of building up a new piece of music after having scraped and salvaged the elements from stems (as we’ll be showing you in the tutorial below).

You never know what you’re going to get from a remix project, and we’ve made sure this is reflected in the diversity of packs on offer. With everything from house to rock ’n’ roll, there’s a wealth of unusual material that you can pick apart and turn into whatever style you’d like. Sometimes, the stranger the transition from genre to genre, the better the result – just consider classic hip-hop’s use of classical and jazz recordings to make lively, stand-out new tunes.

These remix kits feature packs made by Big Fish Audio, Loopmasters, Get Down Samples, Industrial Strength, Singomakers and System 6 Samples, making it a who’s who of top-quality track fodder. The Singomakers and System 6 entries won’t be found anywhere else, as they’ve been made especially for this issue of FM!

Each construction kit contains high-quality, royalty-free WAV sounds that have all been designed to complement each other sonically. Some of the collections also contain individual hits, tracks and MIDI files – there’s no fully standard format to speak of. Piecing them together in a unique arrangement is up to you.

You can find every one of these remix kits on our FileSilo download platform (www.filesilo.co.uk/ futuremusic). Log in and add this issue to get access to them all.

What’s the alternative? Well, if you’re not planning to release a remix into the wild, you could hop your production chops on a piece of fully copyrighted music. Sometimes, making an ‘unofficial’ remix of a fully-released track is just the thing to practise your sonic deconstruction and sound isolation skills, and it can also be one way to get the attention of a record label, with an unsolicited (but unreleased) version put in front of the eyes and ears of the right person. This kind of bootleg remixing is the hardest of the lot, requiring either an illicit supply of stems or some near-voodoo-like unmixing capabilities from the artist, but this makes it a great – if a little hardcore – way to get yourself out there.