Remix Heaven

The big day has finally arrived and it’s time to record my Live Loop performance of God Is Smilin’ On You. Most of the performance is spontaneous and improvised, but I had some specific ideas about the start and end of the track, and a few lyrical phrases I really wanted to include.

For the start, I created some scenes that progressively introduce the drums, bass and melody cells which I played in order with whatever timing felt good at the time.

For the climactic ending, I have a surprise in store that I don’t want to spoil. One element I liked from my experiments that I want to retain is repetition before the climax and I have a specific lyrical line in mind, so I moved that scene to the end to use as the penultimate scene.

I colour coded the vocal cells and highlighted ones I really liked so my attention would be drawn to them and I’d be more likely to include them in the performance.

Four minutes of constant dialogue is fatiguing for the listener, so I created separate melodic cells that I can sequence in the middle of the performance to break things up a bit. I introduced these when I felt suited the mood in the performance.

I resolved the issue of the varying vocal synchronisation between verses by not worrying about it. Verses 1, 4 and 5 have the same vocal synchronisation anyway, and switching to and from lyrics from verses 2 and 3 doesn’t jar too much now that all the other layers are in place (ala Layer Cake Orchestration^TM). In fact, it produces a mildly unsettling effect which fits the uncomfortable truths expressed in the original song.

Towards the end of the performance, I prioritise lyrics from the final verse since it’s my favourite and it’s also where the intensity of Mr Flash’s performance builds towards the original climax. My structure retains some elements reminiscent of the original which you could loosely call verses with musical interludes, but there’s no chorus anymore and the structural divisions are all improvised according to how I feel at performance time.

The brief for this assignment was to do a remix that is “completely new, surreal, bizarre and/or outrageously unexpected”, and the climax of the track is intended to match this.

I recorded the performance by enabling Live Loops Performance Recording and recording into the Track view alongside the ambient track. I paid attention to the time display to see when I was getting close to the 4-minute mark so I could initiate the penultimate and final cells. Even at the smallest view on my 4K monitor, I had to scroll the Live Loops window left and right to access all the scenes during the performance:

With the main performance recorded, it was time to bust out my inner DJ and play with all the controls in Remix FX in front of my imagined crowd of screaming, adoring fans:

After a couple of trial runs to see what sounded good, I enabled Track recording automation mode on the Stereo Out channel, pressed Play and hit every button and control I could on Remix FX to add funky DJ sounds to the final track, pretending I was Mark Ronson. I avoided the temptation to do much fine tuning to the result, only removing a little automation on the final repeated lyric so it didn’t obscure the message I wanted to highlight.

Then I went to the dentist, gave my ears a break and came back for a final mixing/mastering pass.

Here’s the final result: