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.

I’m pretty happy with the way God Is Smiling On You has come together, but there is something that I feel is missing, and it’s a sense of upper register melodic movement. The original song had a repeated 4-bar synthesiser riff in counterpoint to the 2-bar bass riff, which sounded like this:

To retain some of the grittiness of The (original) Message and make my remix more sonically interesting, my track needed some “Good Dirt”. I also wanted some continuity so I added a background texture moving through the whole piece that isn’t coupled to the Live Loop scenes.

Today it was time to add some bass to my remix of The Message and I started off by checking out the original bass riff. Here’s what it sounded like, thanks to iZotope RX 8’s Music Rebalance function:

My bespoke workflow is highly intuitive, based on whatever subconscious thoughts and ideas come to me. The next idea was to use granular synthesis in Alchemy to manipulate the sound of a female orgasm. Our lecturer had taught us granular synthesis in class, so I’m sure he’ll approve, and this seems like the ideal use for it.

I wanted to use the Logic Pro X Step Sequencer for this assignment, partly because I wanted to learn how to use it, and partly because step sequencing was one of the requirements. So today I converted my MIDI drum rhythm cells to Step Sequence cells using largely the same pattern, with two changes:

One of the challenges of doing this using Live Loops in Logic Pro to resequence lines of dialogue from The Message is that the relationship between the start of each vocal line and the beat varies frequently. This is reflected in the vocals starting a different number of 32^nd notes before the main beat in many lines, with some verses tending to start earlier than in others:

Having extracted Mr Flash’s vocals from The Message with iZotope RX 8, my next step was to import them into Logic Pro X and convert them into Live Loops. I’d never used Live Loops before, but it turned out to be pretty simple.

iZotope Rx 8 has a mind-blowing feature called Music Rebalance that allows you to change the balance between Vocals, Bass, Percussion and Other instruments in an already-mixed track. Here’s a visual of my starting point, The Message by Grand Masterflash and The Furious Five:

My favourite rap song of all time is The Message by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five. It came out in 1982 when I was in high school, and I learned all the words by heart. It inspired me to imagine that I was a rapper too, and I joked around with my friends about how we we’re always bugging out (doing something else when you should be rap dancing); because we couldn’t actually rap. Or dance.