It's it's remix time time

I was recently contacted by someone from the Gearslutz forum about a remix. He had this rather chill out vocal house track that he wanted me to remix into something a bit more dancefloor friendly. I decided to grab the offer as I've never made a remix before and it might prove out to be a good learning exprience. I had a pretty good vision from early on of what I wanted to do with the remix. The original had some good bits I could easily use in my remix and since I liked the vocals, it sounded like quite an easy, quick job. Just use those good bits as a basis, then add some bits that sound more like Barfunkel music, mess around with stuff for a while and hopefully something nice will emerge.

Even though I made the core of the remix in like 4-5 hours, it took me 5 days to complete it. As I wanted as good results as I possibly could I had to up my quality control and simply not put out any half-baked ideas. Remixing stuff is in some way easier and in some ways more difficult than writing your own material. When you just make your own stuff you can do whatever you want, with a remix you're working with something someone else made, which can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you don't necessarily have to write the hardest bit, ie. the main hook of the track because it's already there, a curse because your hands are tied to an extent. Now, I do know some remixes are so far removed from the original that you can barely recognize it. Sometimes you can't at all. I didn't want that but at the same time I wanted it to sound like a Barfunkel track and not just like the original with a few different drum sounds or such.

The elements of the original that ended up in my remix were obviously the vocals (well bits of them at least), the pad sound you hear in the beginning of the track and the e-piano, which was just a short snippet of a longer, more evolving piece. The rest of the elements come from my imagination. I also upped the tempo a little bit, to make it a bit less chilled out. All in all, I'm quite satisfied with this remix, especially considering it's the first remix I've ever made.

You can listen to it here:




Due to a delay in the mastering process, the original is not yet online so I can't post it for comparison. I'll add it to this blog post when I can, which will hopefully be very soon.