REBIRTH OF THE COOL
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ken Micallef
Four top remixers discuss their parts in the continuing trend of remixing vintage classics into modern floor fillers.
Since taking seed from its Jamaican roots three decades ago, remix culture has pervaded every corner of society. Beyond the arguable notion that the very act of composing constitutes a remix (as some suggest), contemporary remix production has its actual roots in the sound systems of '70s Jamaica. Lee “Scratch” Perry, Rudolph Ruddy Redwood and King Tubby are the dub-crazy forefathers of the modern remix. Perry's vast catalog — often recorded using a Roland Space Echo, Mutron Phaser and Teac ½-inch 8-track tape with The Upsetters and Bob Marley and the Wailers — and Tubby's King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (Rockers/Shanachie, 1976) are masterpieces of Jamaican music and iconic touchstones in remix history. Their influence is felt in hip-hop, pop, dance, metal and country music.
Jamaican-born Kool Herc is credited with bringing breakbeat DJing to the U.S. in the '70s, an idea further developed by Grandmaster Flash, whose single, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (Sugar Hill, 1981), blended tracks from Blondie, Chic, Furious Five, the Incredible Bongo Band, Spoonie Gee and Queen and into a frenetic, innovative remix. Some remixes have become as popular as the original tracks: Coldcut's “Paid in Full” (Eric B. & Rakim, Island, 1987), Todd Terry's megahit remix of “Missing” (Everything But the Girl, Atlantic, 1994) and Mad Professor's No Protection (Massive Attack, Virgin, 1995).
For well more than a decade, the commercial significance of the remix has been unquestioned. But how relevant are they still, musically? Given the current saturation of remixes, many created for one-off projects or commercially crass concerns, perhaps the remix itself has seen better days. For some, however, the remix is the most vital form of music making in existence.
“The remix has become the basic currency of how people think about creativity,” DJ Spooky proclaims. “It's really not separate from when you make a mix. You are already thinking about how many versions there are. That is a Jamaican idea. Bands like Nine Inch Nails release albums in GarageBand; you can put that CD in your computer and break down the tracks and make your own versions. Or on Mark Ronson's album, Version, he is actually trying to make hip-hop [and soul] versions of the original songs.”
Labels certainly aren't backing off from minting fresh cash from old catalog, and sometimes they even strike musical gold. Verve has released three very successful Verve/Remixed CDs; Blue Note, Savoy and Sony followed suit. New remix compilations abound as well: Ojos De Brujo's Techari Mixes (Six Degrees, 2007), Motown Remixed Vol. 2 (Motown/UM, 2007), Miles Davis' Evolution of the Groove (Sony/Legacy, 2007) and Geo Remixed Big Beats for a Small Planet (National Geographic, 2007). Two more recent releases show resourceful sonic sculptors finding new ways to address vintage sources. Billie Holiday's Remixed & Reimagined (Sony/Legacy, 2007) and Bob Marley and the Wailers' Roots, Rock, Remixed (Quango/Tuff Gong, 2007) gather an ambitious cast to remix mad versions of those iconic musicians' work.
TIME-STRETCHING MARLEY MAGIC
Composed of Jed, DJ Haul and DJ Mason, Afrodisiac Sound System took the stereo file mix of Marley's “Soul Shakedown Party” and freaked it out with distorted bass, delay, reverb and stripped-down sounds: pure dub trickery (to hear this remix, go to www.quango.com/ecards/bobmarley). Relying on Ableton Live, PSP Vintage Warmer, King Dubby Dub Delay and Universal Audio UAD-1 plug-ins, Afrodisiac punched up the track while retaining its essence.
“We would work in two bars at a time,” Jed explains, “until we found something that felt pretty natural. We spent a lot of time trying a ton of different samples to find the ones that fit with the track. Then we would paste that across the entire track and go section by section to make any compositional changes. We will take two bars and program those two bars, paste it for the whole thing, then go in and make variations and changes working off that beat.”
Like most of the remixers on Roots, Rock, Remixed (including King Kooba, Fort Knox Five and Bombay Dub Orchestra), Afrodisiac sped up the track slightly for dancefloor friendliness. Jed credits Ableton Live as his time stretching secret weapon.
“Ninety-five percent of remixes are done in Ableton Live for its time-stretching ability,” Jed explains. “We used it to quantize the track. It is really good at independently changing pitch and time. The program applies a process, you go through it and determine where the downbeats are, or Live can do it itself, then it applies different kinds of time stretching to the material to make it as unobtrusive as possible. It's a miracle program.”
“Soul Shakedown Party” also uses Native Instruments Reaktor to replicate '80s-era Syndrums, Roland Juno-106 for bass sounds and Neve EQ for light vocal processing. When working with Marley's music, which is known to millions, less is more. A similarly sparse aesthetic was applied to DJ Spooky's Marley remix.
THE RAINBOW-SWIZZ CONNECTION
Originally a churning reggae track driven by Aston Barrett's wobbly bass line, Spooky upends “Rainbow Country” not by editing its components but by suspending them in deep space. (Listen to it at www.myspace.com/djspooky.) He adds a turbulent fuzz bass in the intro and distorted delays to Marley's voice and then advances the tempo, but the remix is similar to the original.
“The Marley track was at a slower tempo, so I went for a dub hip-hop feel,” Spooky says. “Hip-hop is on average 10 to 15 bpm faster than dub. I wanted to stay true to the form but update it with software that made it kind of a fun digital thing.”
Spooky works almost entirely in Cakewalk Sonar Producer 5, having abandoned outboard gear for plug-ins. Spooky developed part of his concept while working on an upcoming Trojan Records 40th Anniversary remix project. “Rainbow Country” is bathed in space junk and noise.
“That's the Sonar plug-ins,” he notes. “In the intro, I used the root notes of the track. With drum 'n' bass or techno, every song has its root note. Marley's band was really tight. You can easily drop a Marley track into a hip-hop set, and there won't be much difference. I wanted to maintain that and extend that sub bass that hip-hop goes for, like Swizz Beatz. I did all the sub bass with Sonar's plug-ins and the beats in Propellerhead ReCycle. I put the low end down in frequency and looped the horns out a bit, too — that worked better for a hip-hop party vibe.
“I mixed his voice in the same acoustic range as the track,” he adds. “Marley's voice works really well with the bass line, and it is the bass line in a way. Sonar lets you extract vocal clips in a way that you can still maintain their integrity. It let me pull the track apart cleanly and then mix Marley's voice. They didn't give me separate components on multitrack because Lee Perry burned down his studio [The Black Ark, where Marley recorded] in 1979; he felt it was possessed by demons.”
THE ORIGINAL QUEEN OF SOUL
Approaching Billie Holiday, much less remixing her, is stepping on holy ground for jazz fans. Holiday is the original tortured diva/courageous downtempo queen, predating by 50 years Beth Gibbons, Erykah Badu and Amy Winehouse. But as with the Marley remixes, the assembled cast (including DJ Logic, Tony Humphries, Lady Bug, Madison Park and GXR) understood the sacrosanct nature of the source material. Working from a single stereo track (and typically paid a flat fee as with the Marley CD), the remixers were once again faced with extracting single elements from an overall group performance.
“Using a single track of ‘I'm Gonna Lock My Heart’ was a pain in the ass,” James Cool of Madison Park explains (the duo also includes his wife DeAnna). “I tried every VST that claimed it could pull things apart, but not one could extract vocals from music. So we used the EQ in Steinberg Nuendo, which has a great built-in mixer, and rolled back the low and high end and punched the midrange, which is really where her vocals were. Tweaking it allowed us to bury the music a little bit, so it wasn't quite as prominent. Then I could lay stuff on top of it and make it sound organic.”
Madison Park's reworking of Lady Day's 1938 hit draws heavily on Massive Attack; the track swims in ominous strings, nocturnal bleeps and a colossal, sludgy beat. Elements of the original song peek through the mix, tweaked trumpet and swing-era drums circling Holiday's treated vocal, which shakes and strobes like a dying satellite transmission.
“That strobing effect is a free VST plug-in called Chopper,” Cool reveals, “a filter that allows you to literally choose a saw wave or a sine wave and adjust the tempo to match your song. It runs like a MIDI filter, it turns on-off, on-off, on-off. We also treated her vocal with the EQ in Nuendo to sound like an AM radio.”
After tempo-mapping the original track in Nuendo (speeding it up by about 6 bpm), Cool constructed the beat from sample libraries, created a bass line with Spectrasonics Trilogy bass module, added weird effects from a Novation V-Station soft synth and threw in subliminal vowel sounds from a human beatbox CD.
“The tempo was all over the place, so I took the original track, laid it out, chopped it up and created something that would stay at 110 bpm,” he says. “There were spaces and gaps where I had to stretch and pull sounds or shorten them. Then I would go underneath four measures at a time, drop in the kick drum, add a hi-hat, snare or cymbal and build it that way. We experimented with the beat against her voice for five days to make it work.”
The core of the track, besides Holiday's treated voice, is the rich electric piano and string sounds. Pulling the song like Silly Putty, they frame the production in a melancholy, after-the-rain bliss.
“The piano is Applied Acoustics Lounge Lizard EP-2,” Cool recalls, “a $129 plug-in that sounds great. The strings are from a symphonic sample CD of the Vienna Philharmonic. Then we combined those sounds with dB-T Tempo Delay and reverb in Nuendo to make it sound floaty. Then pulled the strings in and out volumewise.”
RESPECT TO THE GOLDEN VOICE
Though Remixed & Reimagined features beat-driven remixes like Swingsett & Takuya's “I Hear Music” and Lady Bug's “Spreadin' Rhythm Around,” somehow it's the darker, more moody versions that best reflect Holiday's voice. GXR's “Long Gone Blues” remix may be mid-tempo, but its use of lush synth pads, dub bass and woozy vocal treatment is irresistible. (Listen to this remix at www.myspace.com/gxrmusic.) The original track recalls a sweltering summer day, a relaxed swing groove topped by a jiving small group and Holiday's whimsical delivery. GXR — Simon Cooper and Phil Webb — turn this sleepy charmer into a fat chill-out track, recasting Holiday's quixotic lover into an ethereal space goddess.
Working in Ableton Live and Steinberg Nuendo, GXR “rolled off the bottom frequencies of her voice from 150 Hz, so you lose the double bass and the drums a bit,” Cooper explains. “Then we boosted a little bit of the middle, around 1,000 Hz, to bring out her voice. We built all the layers of pads and sequences underneath. It supported her voice, but also the band was unheard to a degree. It took a bit of editing and studio wizardry.”
That wizardry included toys such as reFX Vanguard and Superwave P8 plug-in synths, Native Instruments B4 Hammond organ emulator and Klanglabs Vokko vocoder plug-in (in the vocal chorus). GXR filled the track with roaming synths and pads.
“The Superwave has this gate-cum-frequency function, so it's literally a matter of playing a couple chords,” Cooper explains, “but using the gate function and programming the steps that the gate triggers. That is what makes the staccato hits in the intro sequenced section. Layered over that is a reFX Vanguard synth playing a pad that runs throughout the track to fill in when the original track drops out. The bass is a Rob Papen Albino bass plug-in synth — looped.”
Though the vocal refrain in the chorus is effected, the verses are relatively flat. Was this a matter of respect or function?
“We didn't want to mess with her voice,” Cooper says. “Her phrasing and emotion are fantastic. Her imperfections are what give it that magic. So we just added a bit of reverb and repeat delay at the end of each phrase to carry on her words. It was easy to isolate this vocal, easier than some of the other tracks that were remixed.”
Though purists may balk at the notion of remixing past masters, there is no denying the appeal — both commercial and aesthetic — of presenting this rarified music to new audiences. And as it has in the past, the remix provides the perfect platform for shaping the past and the present into contemporary musical currency.
AFRODISIAC SOUND SYSTEM
“SOUL SHAKEDOWN PARTY” REMIX
Ableton Live DAW
Allen & Heath Xone:02 DJ mixer
Apple Mac G5 computer
Empirical Labs Lil Freq rack EQ unit
Jomox Airbase drum machine
M-Audio BX8a monitors
Moog Source, Opus 3 analog synths
Native Instruments Reaktor Limelight software module
PSP Vintage Warmer compressor plug-in
Roland Juno-106, SH-101 analog synths
Waldorf Pulse synth
Universal Audio UAD-1 signal-processing plug-ins
DJ SPOOKY
“RAINBOW COUNTRY”REMIX
Cakewalk Sonar Producer 5 DAW
Cycling '74 Max/MSP software
Pioneer CDJ-1000 CD turntable
Propellerhead ReCyle software
Technics SL-1200MK2 turntable
GXR “LONG GONE BLUES” REMIX
Ableton Live DAW
BBE Sonic Maximizer processor
Dell Dimension 3000 computer
Klanglabs Vokko Vocoder
Mackie HR824 monitors
Native Instruments B4 virtual organ
PSP Vintage Warmer
reFX Vanguard soft synth
Steinberg Nuendo DAW
Superwave P8 soft synth
Tascam M25/24 console
Waves L3 Multimaximizer mastering plug-in
MADISON PARK
“I'M GONNA LOCK MY HEART”REMIX
Applied Acoustics Lounge Lizard EP-2
virtual piano
Genelec 1031A monitors
Medion Pentium 4/3 GHz PC
Modulus Graphite bass guitar
Native Instruments Komplete, Battery
virtual instruments
Novation V-Station soft synth
Propellerhead Reason software
Roland JP-8000 synth
Spectrasonics Atmosphere, Trilogy
soft synths
Sony Acid Pro software
Steinberg Nuendo 2 DAW
Vienna Symphonic Library
virtual instrument
Universal Audio UAD-1 Studio Pak
DSP plug-ins
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