Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five: The Message album art with Remix Heaven

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.

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Alchemy synthesiser screenshot

Oh My God!

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.

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Logic Pro session with Live Loops and Track View

Fixing The Groove And Adding A Beat

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 32nd notes before the main beat in many lines, with some verses tending to start earlier than in others:

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Colourful circles representing workflow states with lots of colourful lines connecting them

God Is Smiling On You, But He’s Frowning Too

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.

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