How to Start a Remix – Step By Step Guide

Hey guys, this is echo sours and you’re checking out a tip and trick tutorial video on a DSR.

In this video, we’ll be checking out how you can start to create remixes and I’m going to look at a bunch of different topics in this video, everything from finding acapellas, creating acapellas to finding the core is and actually starting your remix, right So first things first, where do you start?

Well, you need an acapella.

Hopefully, you can get an official acapella.

That way it can be an official remix.

And to do that, you either need to know the artist or have connections to a label publisher.

whoever owns the rights to the song and tries to get the studio grade acapella.

Now with smaller artists, it’s really actually surprisingly easy to reach out to and be like, Hey, I love your track.

I want to do a remix of it.

You know, what do you think about that and a lot of times they will just send you the stems now. If it’s a really old song and it’s like a lesser-known smaller artist, that probably will, if it’s an older track, it’ll reduce

I really liked the female singer.

really, really small, lesser-known female singer.

The song came out like three weeks prior to when I heard this and I was like, I was just cold.

I think I reached out to her on Facebook.

I was like, hey, love your track, blah, blah, blah produce sound design that will stick right and then she just was like, cool.

Yeah, that’d be awesome.

It was like a piano ballad type track.

She sent me her she had her producer send everything and he still had it.

So that worked in my favour.

So that would be an official remix at that point.

Now an unofficial remix means you don’t have the actual right to do a sad remix, you’re just sourcing the acapella from somewhere.

So there are a few different ways to do that.

The best way is to try to actually find the studio acapella online and there are a few different sources.

So my favourite one is acapella for you.

Now, I’m trying to find In this video, we’ll be looking at Selena Gomez and marshmallow and the wolf track that they did together.

So I typed in wolves didn’t come up.

I could try Selena Gomez and see if that comes up.

So this is a, you know, pretty easy site to use.

You can search for acapellas you can browse.

Let’s try searching again.

See if it comes up.

So we have some Selena Gomez stuff here button, not what I’m looking for.

Now, you’ll see that some of them have bitrate.

So if they’re 192, odds are it’s not a studio quality bitrate.

It might be if it’s a really old song, but if it’s a newer song, and it’s, you know, 190 It’s good.

It’s going to sound like a potato.

So you don’t want that.

You try to try to find one that you know, like, here’s one here’s a studio acapella 320.

So if you want to remix love, you like, like a love song.

For some reason, if you wanted to remix that, there it is, right now.

Let’s say you can’t find the acapella you’re looking for.

There’s one more pretty valid choice or step you can try taking and that’s finding the instrumental.

I know that sounds counterintuitive, but stick with me.

So I actually did find a studio instrumental for Selena Gomez marshmallow wolves.

And it was on YouTube.

So I wanted to download it.

So all I did was ScreenFlow playing it recorded basically into my computer.

So that’s how I have this instrumental.

So let’s solo this real quick.

Right, so that is the instrumental now under that I have the full song.

And I actually bought this just for this video.

It was the worst 69 cents I have ever spent.

But here we are.

So we did.

Yeah, we have both of these in live right now.

So what you need to do if you can find the instrumental but can’t find the acapella is flip the phase, right, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to invert the phase on the instrumental, so you need to make sure that they are really lined up And this wasn’t really lined up, so I had to line it up.

So if we zoom in here, we can see that you can see they’re not starting at the same point, if you’re, if you’re using live when you import your audio and make sure that you have warp off because you don’t want it to actually warp So if I play these both together, now we want to make sure that the transients on things like kicks are really lined up, right, because when you reverse the phase, you’re reversing the polarity of when the amplitude crosses over the access points, right So see how this is going up.

This is going up, this is going up at the same time, right?

It’s going down at the same time.

If we reverse the phase we want, we want to basically flip this as this goes up on one track it goes down on the other, which should in turn mute that audio.

So what we’re going to do is go into utility if you’re in life and if your logic user.

You can do this with the utility as well.

You go to the utility folder and you can load it in.

For instance, in the game you need to flip the phase.

You can also, in logic, actually go to your audio editor and go to File and hit the Edit phase.

So for all the logic users out there, like, Oh, I’m not in logic right now.

So what I’m going to do is go into utility, turn on the phase flip here for left and right, keep it to stereo.

I want the width to be 100%.

And I’m going to turn the gain down a little bit.

I’m doing it because I’m trying to match the gain.

So make sure that your tracks are pan dead center.

And for this to work, you really do need it to be aligned as close as you can.

Now, this is where it can kind of go wrong is if you think you have it aligned, but you don’t.

So in Ableton, it’s actually kind of a pain in the ass.

In my suit, I zoom in a bunch.

So if you zoom in a ton, you get these little dots, which is nice.

But if you don’t go that far, it’s a little bit hard to see things.

And in other data was like da W is like Pro Tools and logic.

You can nudge things by texture samples.

I can only do that here.

But you can zoom in to a great degree, which is nice.

So what I’m going to do is zoom in, so I can see these dots.

I mean, zoom back out.

So it doesn’t matter if I’m taking the whole song right now.

So yeah, I only have part of it selected.

I’m going to zoom in until I start seeing the dots.

Now, this is pretty close.

So I’m going to do is I’m going to Command click, and let’s try to get these dots to line up.

So that dot that dot, dot, dot.

Alright, so now if I zoom back out, it should still look pretty good, is what I’m hoping, unless let me go to a section that has more information.

Alright, so let’s just start playing this, okay.

Alright, so it sounds like it’s lined up, right?

Sounds nice and tight.

So I’m going to go on to utility now.

And I’m going to turn it on, make sure that both of these are selected, and let’s see what it says.

Right, so it’s working pretty well right now.

As you can see, you know, you, if I turn this gain up and down, they’ll start to work a little less.

That’s because I have discrepancies with my volumes, because these tracks weren’t the exact same volume.

So if I take this to 7.

2, that might help.

But let’s see.

Yeah, so a lot of the debt, a lot of it is definitely out, which is nice.

So I’m going to zoom back in here.

And we’re gon na see if we can get it a little bit tighter, since this little marker there, and let’s zoom in, actually right here.

All right, so let’s zoom in.

Here, this is pretty close.

Those dots are lining up.

So that might be as good as it gets with this example.

This isn’t an exact science, it doesn’t always work.

Sometimes it works better than others.

It really just depends on how the tracks are, but this is right, so it’s a pretty good amount of reduction.

Right?

Now there are a couple of other things you can do at this point, bounce it or export it.

And then what you could do is you could load up two different plugins, you could load up an equalizer and a gate.

So I’m just gon na do this on the master right now, because I don’t want to bounce out and re import.

But the EQ, what you’re essentially going to do is you’re going to use a mid side EQ, hopefully that you have this linear phase.

I mean, it’s not going to move the phase things around.

It might defeat the purpose, you know, of what you’re doing.

But what you’re then going to do is listen to the track.

There might be some sub frequencies coming through, there might be some low frequencies, there’s probably going to be some claps and snares as well.

Hopefully, a good amount of the claps or high hats seem like they’re panned out to the right.

So I’m going to turn this on.

Let’s listen to it as I do.

I say just sell that band. If you have headphones or you’re listening on monitors, are able to hear everything above 4000 hertz, stereo, not in the middle, right, because the voice is most likely going to be primarily panned up the middle, the right

Now, I took it a step further and I applied a gate to it.

If you guys don’t know what a gate is, it’s kind of like a compressor in reverse where anything above the above your threshold it lets through and anything under it, it’s going to just completely So if I turn the gate on though, all right, you can hear that it takes out that you right, which is a lot better.

So at this point, we now have our acapella and we can start to bounce things out.

And now we can move on to the next stage of creating our remix.

And that is understanding the song.

So check that out now.

I said that we have an acapella.

There are a couple of things we need to figure out about the track before we can decide on, like, Okay, well what type of remix?

Do I feel like doing this?

And what type of remix?

I mean, do we want to?

Or do you want to ultimately do a brand new instrumental for the whole track?

Or do you want to change and can do a genre flip like this is like a future pop track?

So maybe we speed it up, slow down, so we can get it into like a trap or kind of like a hybrid trap dubstep range.

And if that’s the case, do we want to keep the verse in the, you know, the initial build and break down the same and just change the drop?

Or do we want to do a brand new instrumentation the whole way through and just kind of reinterpret the vibe and feeling of the song?

Maybe we shouldn’t mess with BPM too much.

Either way, we need to know those three things.

We know BPM is the key.

And this kind of as a, you know, secondary to the key is the chord progression, especially if you want to introduce your own melodic chordal elements to the track.

Alright, so let’s do that now.

And there are a bunch of easy ways to do this.

My favorite way is actually just tempo tapping on my phone.

There are a bunch of apps that you can just tap. You can do that in da w stew.

There are also plugins and I pulled one up.

It’s free.

It’s called beat counter by Terragon Audio, and it will listen to your track and try to tell you or figure out what the tempo is right, so that plugin looks like this.

We’re just going to use the template tap widget, which I already did.

But I, when I’m doing the template tap, I’ll stick it in the section of the track that has a lot of drums.

So this has claps right on every quarter 2341234.

So it’s really easy to tap, which is you know, with it and I got to like 124.

8.

So I just assumed it was at 125.

Now, we’ve already lined up the audio.

So I’m going to highlight both of these tracks here.

So we’re shifting clicks, we’re taking everything and let’s change our tempo, BPM to 125.

Now let’s go to the start of the song here.

And so the way to test to see if you got this right is to take a couple bars, and then loop it.

See if there’s like a weird glitch when it starts over.

So 125 Alright, so now we have the tempo, we need to find the key of the track.

Now I actually play by ear.

So what I’ll do is I’ll grab a guitar, which I’m reaching for right now, or my keyboard and load up a keyboard and just try to find the bass notes.

So with this track here I am playing it.

So I’m just kind of finding the bass notes I have.

And I think they actually it’s just so then my next question is okay, well there’s the notes.

If I know the notes, I can try to figure out the key.

I know this is a B, right?

So I’m assuming this track could be in B.

The next thing I’m going to do is try to figure out what it was.

minor major does not have your sad sad I am super freaking sad, so I know this is a minor chord.

So my guitars like that, so I think the actual chords are like and then some like weird hammer on there.

Something like that.

Right.

So now I know the chord progressions. I got B minor, B minor, to a D.

to G.

Myself, I play along with it.

De Rs, we know the chords, what is the key?

Well, if you know your scales, you can probably figure it out pretty easily.

I know that this is in B minor, because the chords just found out, but if you’re not as if you don’t know as much about music theory as you need to to figure out the chords, then there are a bunch of ways to do it.

First If it’s a big song like this one, Selena Gomez, big marshmallow big, it’s probably just gon na come up.

But if you’re remaking a track that you found on SoundCloud, for instance, and it’s a smaller artist or DJ producer, only a few 100,000 plays it probably won’t come up on Google. But not to worry.

There are apps that you can download different ones for different you know, iOS and Android, so don’t spout off what I use, but they exist. Just go to your App Store and search for music key finding app.

Basically, they work like Shazam.

You play the track, they listen to it pop out a key.

They’re not always incredibly accurate, but some of them are pretty good depending on the genre of music, or you can go to the site, and I like going to the site, because it is called a music theory site.

And the URL will be in on the video here on the screen and in the description, but you pick the chords, and it will pop out in this little wheel here of different keys, it’ll pop it out, and it gives you the corresponding, you know, relative minor, to all the So we know that the first chord was a B minor, so I’m going to go to B.

And we’re going to choose B minor.

So now it knows Okay, these are the potential keys that B minor can be in the right kind of cool to know that and look at that, the next chord was a D major went up to D major on the guitar.

So those keys remain the same, nothing moved, right?

Then after that, we went down to a G major.

So now we’re reduced to these two keys.

And the last one that we had on the track in the bread or the build up was a I don’t think I played when he was in a major.

That was one.

So it’s B minor keys, either D or D minor.

And if you’re wondering what the differentiation is, it’s just which one you resolve to essentially, D is the relative major, B minor is the relative minor, to D major, like C has minors as relative major, right, all the white keys.

So that’s all that’s happening there.

Pretty cool little resource.

So now that I know my key is in B minor, I can think okay, you know, if I want to juxtapose it to this switch to this, this BPM in this key, I can set I can start to set scales, for instance, in like, you know, the piano roll Now, let’s say you don’t know how to do what I just did.

And let’s say you don’t really play by ear.

Well, there are other ways to extract the melody.

So one of my favorite ways to do it is actually melodyne.

And we’re going to load up melodyne right now.

So melodyne is actually typically thought of as a pitch correction tool.

But you can actually use it to do this.

So I’m going to load it into the track the track with everything.

So this is the full instrumental.

And I’m going to hit up here.

I’m going to go to transfer, will give myself a bar of space, before it happens.

We have transferred on.

I’m gon na hit play.

Now I can talk about this was doing it, it’s on track.

So I want to capture a few different bars of this.

Now the cool thing about this is it’ll actually take her melody as well as the instrumentation because melodyne melodyne can actually do polyphonic, so if we go back here now, to the start of the track size.

I’m gon na go to settings and I’m going to export this as MIDI.

So I imported the MIDI back in and I aligned it up loaded up a piano track.

Alright, so this melodyne doesn’t do a perfect job of this.

And there are some other applications as well.

But I’ve deleted some of these low notes.

There are like a lot of low notes.

I don’t know where it was getting that from, but I have a general idea.

Let’s say this was your first step and you didn’t know exactly what the chords were.

You have an idea of a starting point usually.

Right, so I got that first chord before the slide pretty good, right?

It’s doing it’s just doing really staccato, is there so you can see all the bass notes, right?

And then even when she starts to sing, we can now see some of these notes, right.

So I’m on a three.

So now I’m on this kind of arc, and I can see that’s where she’s starting to sing.

So if we let’s just loop the guitar essentially.

Let’s delete this middy now we don’t need it.

Let’s loop the guitar and she was on three new three notes.

If I loop this right now, I can just start to solo and I’m not the greatest keyboard player in the world.

I don’t know all my scales, no good amount of them.

But I saw the shape that melodyne pulled out.

And then I can start to be like oh cool, so I can start to juxtapose some melodies and actually get into my remix.

Alright guys, that sums up this video on some tips and tricks to get you started getting your remix your official or unofficial remakes If you have any questions or comments, let me know below and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Like I said at the beginning of the video, I’m echo sound works.

Thank you so much for watching guys.

I will see you next time.