Segue

Here is one that I completely forgot about. Despite working on a bunch of tracks with Vitreous, who is based in Amsterdam but formerly of the excellent act My Ninja Lover here in Australia, I had totally skipped the memory of telling Dektek Records that I was up for a remix of his latest release. Even more embarrassingly, I had been cheering on Kris-Ko as he worked through his own very awesome remix of the same track. With a couple days before deadline, the label asked how I was going on the mix. With a “good! Yeah! Absolutely!”, I took it as a chance to break my usual slow habits and use it as an excuse to try out some new gear. Here’s the result, as a preview on Soundcloud. The actual release date is 23rd of June 2009 for Beatport, and everywhere else two weeks later.

The “Segue Does Disco” Dub:

The Original Mix:

The new gear I mentioned testing out was basically a Jazzmutant Lemur and a pair of Beyerdynamic DT770 headphones. The Lemur I talk enough about elsewhere, and the headphones replace an infamous set of Pioneer HDJ1000’s that I posted about earlier. This remix was quite fun, as I simply grabbed all the source files, threw them in Ableton and flagged the bits I thought sounded usable. Those bits I threw in a number of Ableton Drum Racks, which I have mapped out on the Lemur in a custom template I’ve built to act a little like an MPC. Think “modular sampler”. The fun part of using Drum Racks like a sampler is taking a melody, such as the original record of Chris playing his bass, and dropping it into a few slots. From there I just use the Start and End points to isolate unique notes, which I can then jam on the Lemur in real-time.

This let me flip the bass and melody grooves by replaying single notes, and the rest fell into place. Other fun stuff included some cameo vocals from guests around the studio that was as complex as pointing an SM58 at them, and digging through some old disco records for some cheesy fills. As I had a day to do it, I found myself second guessing the new headphones and the “sound” of my new studio space, being the first mixdown I’ve done here, so I went for a drive at midnight around the inner city Brisbane suburb I live in. Which is often patrolled by Police. Leading to me imagining them pulling me over and asking “excuse me son, why are you doing laps of these streets at midnight?”.

“Checkin’ the mix man. Just checking the mix”. I hope you check the remixes and original of Guise out when it drops in a few weeks!

Tags: Ableton, Beatport, Beyerdynamic, Dektek, DT770, Guise, HDJ1000, Jazzmutant, Kris Ko, Lemur, Pioneer, Remix, SM58, Vitreous

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.