Remix Production - Burden
During the module, we received stems from a live lounge session to use in practice for our remix production project, these were provided from The Jacaranda Basement Tapes and contained tracks by the local artist Lois Levin. There were a number of tracks in this session and we were tasked to take our pick and produce a remix, for this I went with the track Burden. This track is out as a studio release on streaming platforms, and in its original form fits a soft paced and soulful rendition within which is mostly an acoustic backing with bass and drums to a blue jazz genre and aesthetic.
I went with this track for the remix due to a number of technical and artistic reasons. To begin with the technicalities of the stems themselves, within the recording session there appeared to have been some alterations to the tracking either at the inputs switching or with sound source alterations, as there were a number of change which effected the level of bleed into some of the mics to the kit and keys especially. This bleed would need to be minimised or worked with to produce a high quality sound in the remix, therefore going with this take and track meant that the level of bleed would be more manageable in comparison to other tracks.
There was also on this take specifically, DI from both the keys and the bass, as well as a DI from the acoustic and minimal bleed on the vocals, making it the ideal take of the track from a technical perspective. The creative reasons which I had when making the choice and contemplating where the tracks could be taken with the remix, with Burden there was a unique rhythm and drive in the vocals which reminded me of a popular liquid DnB track from the artist Wilkinson called “Afterglow”. This track has the classic beat of the genre, cyclically moving the track through at a fast rate which gives a strong forward motion effect with the pace, then underneath rich and driven vocals then accompanied by piano and bass.
Once I had the stems chosen, I exported them out into Logic Pro X as this was the Daw I had chosen to produce the remix. This is due to the versatility of the integrated plugins of which I’m better familiarised with for creative mixing workflows and production processing, over Pro Tools which I find better as a recording and desk operation workstation. Once the session was setup with tracks imported / named / grouped / colour coded, I began going through the stems and revisiting areas to mark which contained the most substantial bleed, the worst of which I muted out and dipped in level until I had a dry base of stems which contained little to no bleed. This consisted of the keys, bass and vocals.
The drums also contained little bleed in this take, but before I could use them I needed to process them to reduce what was there. This process was also applied in an adapted form to the bass also, but consists of responsive envelope filtering to duck out the tail of drum impacts to result in a quicker hit with shorter decay. As well as adding cleaner dynamics as transients dip back to silence after the specified decay time relative to its amount, over room hum or backing noise is wiped out along with bleed.
This was crucial for the next stage of the drum processing, as these audio stems were then flextimed into double-speed to match the liquid DnB tempo range of 170bpm-180bpm. After positive results I went and also did this processing to the bass and this gave the rapid pacing which I was after for the track, and subsequently fit very nicely with the remaining backing of keys and vox. Due to the timing being doubled in speed, this then meant that the stems themselves were only half the duration of the track, to amend this I edited across bars and sections to the second half of the track, with tweaks to breaks and timing done along with the arrangement decision of having a middle-8 section where the drums break down and out to leave space for textural backing for the vocals to then bring it back in again to the second half, a classic arrangement to tracks of DnB sub genres like Liquid / Organica / Deep House and an arrangement element also in the reference track.
Within the studio release of the track unlike the live-lounge there are a few arrangements of strings in the backing which come through as emphasis during the chorus. I’d wanted to add some strings to the remix and thought to do this I’d build them up bigger in a grander sonic arrangement around the stereo field, I then built this up during the intro to add to the textureal opening, which then were filtered using tremolo modulation to duck the layer in and out once the vocals had kicked in.
