After sifting through various stems online I decided on a remix competition for ‘Joakim Carley feat. Reece Lemonius – Warrior’. What drew me initially to this originally drum n bass track was the vocals and also the piano and guitar stems. There were a few nice filter sweeps in the piano stem that I liked and the guitar part sat well in the mix. This remix task was my first experience using Ableton Live and I must say I absolutely love using Ableton. Although the interface doesn’t seem as clear as Protools, the amazing samples and sounds and ability to work in both session view with loops and then arrangement view for building your music. Considering the first two trimesters of my course have been primarily focussed on Protools, it’s great to be introduced to a new DAW and one that I love using too. I know I’m going to get a lot out of this software and EMP is definitely an area I am enjoying more in terms of my course of study.

However, back to the remix, so I began by loading the 3 stems into Ableton and probably the one of the hardest parts of this task was lining up the vocal with the piano. I had to reference the original drum n bass track a few times as the vocal starts on some crazy beat during the 5th bar so it wasn’t a case of just throwing the stems in wherever. I wanted the piano and vocal to stay as the original but I wanted to create a completely different feel based around a new drumbeat. I found a nice deep kick and a cool rim shot sound that I wanted to experiment with and pretty much made a loop that came to me when listening to the vocal and piano track. I thought it’s easier to choose a drum n bass original and chill it down with a nice chilled drum beat rather than the other way around and trying to write drum n bass which would be challenging.

Once the drum beat was down the new feel had been created and from then on I could just build the track. I experimented with some ambient sounds from the Ableton library and picked a few notes that fit within the key of the song which is F#minor. I then added a sub bass line which was the root note of each chord as I was after that real smooth and warm sub bass sound from the bottom end. Anything saw or square like wouldn’t have fit with the mix. I then added some high hats during the chorus and you’ll notice a slightly different rhythm from the first chorus to the second. After the first chorus I threw in the root chord being F#minor and added the 7th to the chord for colour, then the second 8 bar block moved the 7th back to the root to bring the sound back to the tonal centre of the song. This kind of thing seems fairly straightforward to me having a music theory background and a clear understanding of how piano chords work, so it definitely comes in handy when creating synth effects and chords.

From this point I laid out a basic arrangement which was the fun part, putting it all together and figuring out which parts for example the guitar I would bring in and when. I felt by this point I needed to add some other percussion effects like a cymbal crash at the end of the second chorus and the chimes at various points throughout the mix. I wrote a alternate sub bass line at around 3 minutes into the song at a point where the bass is the focus as everything else had reduced down. The finger click that I added here works well in this section keeping it cool, calm and collected. Overall it was a lot of fun working on this and hoping to continue entering remix competitions in the future. Take a listen to my remix below.