UP IN THE CLUB
Apr 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Paul Taylor
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Author Paul Taylor made this remix of "Come to Love" by British group Trademark using the principles he wrote about in this feature.
It's becoming increasingly common for bands to want to broaden their market by bringing in a producer who's more experienced with a laptop than a Les Paul to give songs a punchy, electronic sheen. At some point in your musical career, someone's going to ask you to remix a record that really doesn't cut it for DJ use. They'll request something “club ready,” and you'll be filled with a crawling dread as the stems drop onto your doormat, wondering just what the hell you can do to liven up the weedy, dull original. Even if your source material is great music, it still might not have the required edge to make it stand out in a club environment.
Obeying some ground rules of electronic production will help you get the edge that a club remix needs. But generating a strong hook and pushing the distinctive components of the original record in unusual directions are the keys to remix virtuosity. As early techno transitioned into acid house and gained a wider appeal, one key development was the use of sampling to create more memorable and recognizable tracks; that tradition has continued to the present day. Danceable music has also been founded on highly aggressive, mix-filling synth tones, such as those conjured from the Roland TB-303 or modern multilayered detuned-sawtooth electro patches. Taking such cues from existing memorable tracks is a great way to start out on your remix project.
Remembering that club mixes are engineered for clarity, loudness and drive — rather than for tonal color — is vital; you'll need monitors with a tried-and-true bass response, such as the Mackie HR range or the newer offerings from KRK or Dynaudio. If you're inexperienced, entering a studio geared up for this kind of work — maybe even one offering larger monitors such as Quested midfields — could pay dividends. It's simply not worth attempting a full sound with inadequate monitoring. Here are some tips for each area of a club mix that will help solidify the track into a danceable whole.
GIVE THE DRUMMER SOME: RHYTHM
Every club track — remix or not — is going to have a powerful up-front rhythm section. In most cases, you'll provide the entire drum part yourself, unless there are some particularly distinctive hits from the original you want to capture. Rhythm plays a vital part in reinvigorating the entire character of a track. Think of Run-DMC's classic use of a breakbeat loop over Aerosmith's “Walk This Way,” or Pendulum's thunderous processed uptempo live drums on its version of The Prodigy's “Voodoo People.”
The musical genre is important when choosing your tempo, but it's often worth thinking about going slightly slower than usual. This may be counterintuitive, but lower tempos leave more innate space between important rhythmic elements such as kick drums and bass tones. You can accomplish a quick feel with tricks such as double-time hi-hats, cut-up fills on drum parts and shortened breakdown sections. Don't think that speed always has to come from the bpm counter.
KICK IT
Sorting out a decent kick drum will help if your source material lacks punch. Choosing samples from genres where the kick is all-important, even if you're not working directly in those genres, will give you a head start. German-produced techno and trance kicks as well as UK hardcore and hard-dance samples can work equally well in hip-hop and breakbeat records. Update your sample CD collection: Things have come a long way in the past few years.
If you're going to go with synthesizing your own drums, Native Instruments Dynamo is a good choice for harder tones. Propellerhead Reason also makes a great kick synth: Try chaining and layering Maelström synths and using the routing and processing options to come up with something unusual.
When you have samples ready for layering, go for tuning before EQing: You'll hit the “biting point” more accurately if you don't shelve EQ one of the kicks first. Monitor the layered kick at high volume and check for phasing artifacts, and then switch to a more bass-heavy pair of monitors mounted in a different position if possible. Then turn the whole thing down and check it at a comfortable volume while tweaking a shelving EQ on one kick to eliminate any residual phasing problems. An unsubtle “utility” EQ is best for that: Something powerful such as Logic's parametric EQ or Universal Audio Pultec EQP-1A will work wonders. Compression on well-constructed kicks will frequently be light, with an attack time set to bring out the body of the sound rather than squashing the initial transient.
ENSNARED
You'll probably also want a snare or clap to sit over any breakbeat or percussion loop you use. That isn't as fundamental as the kick, so you can afford to experiment more. Look for samples full of character in something like Spectrasonics Stylus RMX or generate them yourself using an unusual source such as David Farler's NES VST pack (donations accepted; www.davidfarler.com), which emulates the Nintendo NES noise channel. Go for short and tight and then drop a little gated reverb, restricting the stereo spread for added tightness. For a high-quality gate, try Kjaerhus Audio GAG-1 Golden Audio Gate ($78; Windows only; www.kjaerhusaudio.com).
Finally, your other percussion elements will most likely consist of a breakbeat or house loop. For that, experiment with textural effects such as ring modulation, and add some auto-pan from a plug-in such as the free NDC Trem+ (www.niallmoody.com/ndcplugs), as well as the conventional multiband compression and stereo width, to get things moving.
RAISE YOUR VOICE
Assuming your source material is a relatively conventional song, you'll have a key decision to make about how you use its vocals. Retaining song structure might be attractive from a commercial point of view, but it's rarely going to work for a more underground club record. You could consider compromising and using the entire chorus — if it's relatively short — but that will also limit your creativity. That said, replacing chord sequences (some songs will work equally well on the relative minors of most major chords, for example) under a well-known chorus can be devastating.
It's often far better to work with short vocal loops of distinctive phrases: You don't have to go the whole hog and use only one line, but this technique will give you a lot more freedom to move around the chord sequence as you choose. You'll also be able to intersperse samples with your lead sounds.
Sometimes unusual vocal processing can be an effective tool (think Fatboy Slim's “Praise You”), so try buffer-looping effects like free, Windows-only GlitchVST (http://illformed.org/glitch) or Buffer Override (http://destroyfx.smartelectronix.com). Also, you can heavily layer the vocal and give it some space with a larger reverb. That might make it sound like a more conventionally recorded club-track vocal. If you're using a vocal hook, try not to undermine it with overprocessing; only use effects that make it more, not less, distinctive.
Reworking vocals is best avoided: There's nothing worse than a remix that sounds like a dance cover song, usually with a female vocal replacing a male one for extra club friendliness. If you're really stuck, and it's viable, get the original singer back into the studio as a last resort. But you'll usually get a better track from using the original.
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