Last month, we looked at basic editing techniques. This month we are going to delve into the ant of creating extended remixes.

'But how do you actually do an extended remix?' A good question and in most cases, the answer is shrouded in hype and mystery, but as we don't hold with any of that at H&SR, I will endeavour to unravel some of the mysteries of this art, but before I begin, we need a song to remix. Lets take one that looks like this in its 7" format.

Intro Part 1: Bass and drums only (4 bars).

Intro Part 2: As above but with big polysynth chords (4 bars).

Verse 1: Bass and drums, DX7 rhodes, congas, vocal (16 bars).

Chorus 1: As above but with backing vocals, polysynth chords and synth hook line (16 bars).

Verse 2: As above for Verse 1 but with delicate PPG type DX and 16th note sequencer (16 bars).

Chorus 2: As for Chorus 1.

Middle 8: Bass and drums, congas, echoed claps, vocal and backing vocal, arpeggiator flute and 'mega-strings'.

Chorus 3a: As for Chorus 2.

Chorus 3b: As for Chorus 2 but transposed up a tone.

Nothing too earth shattering here in the format and on our 16-track it looks like Figure 1. You can see that as long as we have access to individual sounds, so much can be done to re-arrange our song.

In true 12" style, we're going to extend the intro. Firstly, set up a mix of the introduction part 1 and master it onto your ¼" tape. Now rewind your multitrack and repeat that again. This will give you the first four bars repeated. Now do that all over again so that you obtain four sets of the first four bars. Now, set up a mix for the next four bars of the intro (part 2) and mix that down. Now mix it down again.

Your next job is to tack all of those together to form one continuous intro. Your tape should look like Figure 2 and you must mark the tape as indicated. Firstly, make a mark after the first four bar section on the first beat of the fifth bar A. Now make a mark on the first beat of the first bar of the next four bar section B and then cut the tape and carefully join the two sections together and splice them. Next repeat that process by marking the first beat of the bar of the section after the second four bar section C and then mark the first beat of the bar of the third four bar section D and again, splice them together. Repeat that procedure for all the sections until you have one continuous 24 bar intro. Believe me, that's trickier to explain all that than it is to do!

For the next section, we're going to get that hook straight into the record buyers' heads, but rather than go straight into the chorus, we're going to try it 'a cappella' (ie. unaccompanied vocals).

Right then, fast forward the tape to the chorus and mute everything but tracks 6, 12, and 13. Track 6 contains a cymbal smash which falls on the first beat of the first bar of the chorus and we're going to include it here, for not only does it give us something to cut to but it will also add continuity to the drum track as well as hiding any abrupt cut-off of reverb or echo that sometimes occurs at a splice point where two unrelated sections are juxtaposed. Having the cymbal will also hide any slight mistakes that may crop up with your editing skills! Let us now balance up the vocals. In fact we could put the backing vocals through a DDL giving a synchronised delay and we'll pan the straight vocals to the left and the echoed version to the right and finally put the whole thing through preset 39 of our newly acquired MIDIverb for a 'monk-like' quality. Once you're satisfied with that mix, you can now master it onto ¼". Mark the first beat of the fifth bar following the second four bar section of part 2 of the intro and then make a mark on the first bar of the chorus (listening out for the percussive edge of the cymbal). Now splice them together in the usual fashion.

Now then, let's repeat that little lot but this time we'll add drums. All you have to do is go through all that again but unmute tracks 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and splice them together after marking appropriately.

Now your remix is taking shape and the toms roll at the end of the chorus leads you perfectly into your next section which is going to be an echoed bass drum with the congas. To make this a little more spectacular let's avoid the usual trap of putting the straight bass drum on one side with the synchronised delay on the other and feed the delay into your autopanner so that the echo flies around the stereo image whilst your straight bass drum stays solid in the centre so now, all that is left for you to do is to set the level of the congas. Why not experiment and try out some gated reverb on the congas - always sounds good to me! Now, having mastered that, you can splice it once more.

And so we could continue ad nauseam which would be pointless to continue describing. Of course, you must have something good musically to work with in the first place. If not, no amount of remixing will help. (I believe the saying is 'you can't polish a turd'.)

Tricks of the Trade

But there is more to remixing than just re-arranging the running order of the song's various sections. To return to our hypothetical remix, we suddenly feel that the intro just sauntering in as it does, sounds a bit lacklustre compared with the rest of our monster mix so you want something exciting at the front to create an impact.

You have a few options available to you; you could for instance record a new section onto a spare piece of multitrack to splice onto the front of your remix - maybe something like a nice, legato string piece or a few odd noises or whatever. Alternatively...

Rewind or fast forward, as appropriate, to a chorus. Now mute everything but the polysynth chords. Next feed this into a long synchronised DDL and feed both to a smooth, long reverb. Now, with a bit of jiggery-pokery with the polysynth channels' fader, feed just one chord into the DDL and record that onto a spare piece of ¼" tape. Now comes the fun part! Take that length of ¼" and turn it round so that the end is now the beginning and vice versa. Now mark the end of your back-to-front tape and splice that onto the first beat of the intro. You should now have a slow, backwards echoey/reverby sound that crescendos into the introduction. Dramatic — especially if you do something like pan it or flange it. There are all sorts of possibilities.

For example, how about splicing in a flanged, reversed cymbal just before the middle 8. The track will stop dead and then have the effect of 'falling' into the middle 8. Alternatively, it's often a nice touch just to splice in a few extra beats from a roll so that a bar suddenly goes into some weird and wonderful time signature. Just watch the dancers fall over when confronted with a bar of 15/12! (Sorry about all this. He's Welsh you know. -Ed).

Sync Code

The possibilities offered in a remix really extend themselves, however, if you have a sync code at your disposal. Working on the assumption that you have such a thing on your multitrack tape, you can run extra sequencer parts or drum machine parts 'live' as you mix. Very popular, of course, is to plonk in a latin percussion part courtesy of a TR727, a Yamaha RX21L or Korg DDM220. In fairness, you will need to have quite a few extra mixer channels at your disposal to handle the signal coming off-tape and the extra instruments and effects.

But what happens if you wish to do this but have no sync code on tape. The whole song might have been played by 'real' musicians (does that still happen?) and no code used. Nowadays, we have the technology to overcome this problem. Devices such as the excellent Roland SBX-80, SBX-10, Bokse MIDI Humaniser and the SRC Friendchip allow you to generate a code retrospectively, even if one hasn't been recorded onto the multitrack. The more expensive of these devices use the ubiquitous SMPTE code and the procedure is to record code onto a spare track of the multitrack, keeping in sync with the recording by feeding the device with some form of regular beat. Often, a nice regular hi-hat is good enough but if the hi-hat is very fiddly or there are lots of open hi-hat bits in the pattern then this is not always feasible and so it is often necessary to manually record a cowbell or similar regular sound and this can then be fed into your sync box in order to derive a tempo-dependent code. In the absence of a spare track to record this cowbell pattern, the SBX has a 'tap' button which you can use to program tempo information directly into the unit manually as the tape plays. Once you have done this, you are free to run sequencers and drum machines which will accurately follow the tempo of the track regardless of any speeding up or slowing down that may occur.

If you don't have a sync code and you can't stretch to the cost of an SBX or whatever, (and there are many of us who can't), it is possible to manually 'drop-in' a sequencer part or drum machine pattern and manually sync it as long as you only mix a few bars at a time so that the added parts never have enough time to wander.

Spinning in

What is this strange term so beloved of remix engineers? Spinning in is a technique whereby a part is recorded onto a spare stereo tape machine (or, indeed, nowadays, into a decent sampler) and fed in 'live' onto the ¼" master tape with the rest of the mix. More often than not, these parts are spun in in places where these parts don't normally occur.

As an example, let us say that we wish to add the percussion parts that occur in the chorus to the drum pattern of the verse. Using a spare stereo tape machine, you could record the chorus percussion part alone onto ¼". Then, when running a mix of your verse, you would start this spare tape machine at the appropriate time so that these percussive bits and pieces are mixed into your verse on your master tape. But, before you ask about syncing, we are working on the assumption that the stereo machine will play back the recorded parts at the same tempo, and so, providing that you get the start time correct, there should be no problem. And there lies the rub. Getting the start time on some machines is very difficult as they often take a little while to gather speed and so you have to start the spare machine a fraction of a second before the actual start time of the music recorded onto it. This can be a very trying experience that may well require a few takes to get right. But if you look on this spare tape machine as a sampler with unlimited sampling time at full bandwidth, then I think you'll appreciate the advantages of this method.

Sampling

If you are using a real sampler for such purposes then you don't have start up times to think about because the elaborate editing facilities that exist on a lot of samplers allow you to start your spin in smack on the beat but, as I'm sure the more astute amongst you will have noticed, most samplers are monophonic and so you will lose all stereo imaging so, despite their difficulties, a tape machine may well be a better option.

There are, however, other uses for sampling in the context of a remix. One of the favourites is to reiterate the first beat of a bar, giving a staggered sort of effect. To achieve this, you simply feed the whole mix into your sampler and then, on a length of ¼", you trigger your sampler (either manually or automatically) as appropriate and then you splice that section in with the rest of your piece. One point to watch however, is that you have to have something to cut to and so you will need to record one extra 'stab' at the end. Sadly, as before, your sampler will give you only a mono version but that can be effective sometimes. If you feel that you need stereo, you could feed your sampler into a very fast DDL with the sampler panned hard to one side and the DDL to the other. Another option is to synchronise a longer delay to the tempo of the piece for some extreme rhythmic panning effects. You could also feed your mono sampler into some form of stereo simulator such as the Boss CE300 or TC Spatial Expander to artificially recreate a stereo image. Another effective trick is to pan each 'stab' left and right either manually or automatically via some autopanner. The possibilities are endless. (What about two samplers working together in stereo... Ed?)

Of course, if you don't have a sampler, a razor blade can be equally as effective. By recording a couple of these 'stabs' onto ¼" and splicing them all together, similar results can be achieved and these results will be gloriously stereophonic. The only problem is that it is a little more time consuming and fiddly, but there are certainly advantages. For instance you can introduce or take out instruments on each 'stab', which can add a lot of interest.

New Material

Moving on now, it could be that you wish to add new parts to the track other than synth or drum machine. If you have room on your multitrack you could add these parts but, as is the case here in our hypothetical remix, we don't have enough spare tracks to add anything else. So what's the solution?

Once you have finished your remix you could 'bounce' that back onto a fresh piece of multitrack leaving you with no less than 14 spare tracks to add extra bits and pieces. Unfortunately, you run the risk of losing quality as by the time you re-master the whole thing you'll be on your third generation of the basic remix but, with careful recording, this needn't be such a great problem and adding the extra parts may mask any major deficiencies. Of course, using some form of enhancement will artificially restore anything you may lose. If you have access to an SBX-80 or an SRC then you can reconstitute a sync code for the addition of programmed parts. Alternatively, if you can use a tape machine with centre code facilities such as the excellent new Fostex Model 20, you may be able to master in stereo and keep your code. In fairness though, the splicing may just upset things a little, causing problems with syncing. I feel that resorting to a reconstituted code via SMPTE is your best bet. Then again, there is that lost art known as playing in real time.

In Conclusion

Creative remixing however is not limited to 16-or 24-track studios. 8 or even 4-track studios can produce some very powerful remixes, the only real compromise being that you don't have as much individual access to sounds. For example, if you wanted to do that panned, synchronised delayed bass drum bit. On an 8-track, because you have recorded all the drums onto one track such a thing would not be possible (but then why not record a new bass drum bit direct onto ¼" from your drum machine).

Also, bouncing your remix back onto the 8-track allows more flexibility than you would at first imagine. Unfortunately, remixes of 4-track recordings are not so flexible but not beyond the realms of possibility either.

Despite the length of this article, we've only touched on the subject of remixes. For inspiration and ideas, it's worth checking out any Arif Mardin remixes, especially 'Wood Beez' by Scritti Politti. Also, his remixes of Chaka Kahn's stuff is worth a listen.

The Go West remixes are also very interesting in my view and another belter is the Cameo Megamix of 'She's Strange' where they combine three tunes into one extended dance. Thompson Twins remixes are also worth examining and there are a lot more besides — too numerous to mention here.

To practice, why not dig out some old piece of your own and see what you can come up with - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.