Stealing ideas

Sometimes I wonder if I buy so much NI stuff partly because they have such well produced product videos.  Very possibly.  Below is one of their latest Maschine promos/tutorials.  I like it because Mark Kinchen (who I admittedly hadn't heard of until now),  walks through his workflow and process.  For him, remixing involves:

Mute all the instrument tracks
Play drums with the acapella track
Find a key that sounds good
Chop up acapella vocals
Create a new melody

I'm going to let this be my guide for Towers.  By following this method, I'll inevitably stray much further away from the original than I did on the first three tracks.  I'm going to give this a shot and hope that the limb I'm on doesn't crap out.

Track count

I'm not ready to wrap this up yet, and I've got 19 tracks open in this song.  Usually, I rarely have to switch track banks in my hardware.  I have kind of a haunted vibe happening in this song right now.  We'll see where it goes.

Holocene progress

I'm making slow steps toward a main groove for this song.  So far, I'm assembling this one using existing stems, with some synths and bell sounds added in the Maschine software.  I'm really looking for the one main section to be able to carry the tune on a standalone basis, so it has to be strong.  Although YouTube is full of great remixes from this album, there's really not a lot of Holocene remix attempts that I find really great and original.


Here's the one Justin chose, which really is a creative and well produced take on the song:
Bon Iver Holocene (Kyson Remix) http://awe.sm/aDH4F

Minnesota, WI final draft

Official remix comp results

So Justin has chosen his favorite remixes over at Indaba.  Some great submissions and kind of humbling, to tell the truth.  It seems that he didn't necessarily go for the popular or obvious choice.  I'm hearing all kinds of different interpretations on Spotify, where a remix album was released with all the winners.  Justin took the time to comment personally on a lot of submissions, which I think is above and beyond.  In the past, bands with far less of a following have failed to post up anything until the end of a competition.  I'll link you to the Indaba page for those who may not have Spotify.  Just click on the individual song titles on the right hand side of the page.  As I've said before, all efforts documented on this blog are not related to the contest, other than the sourcing of stems.

Click here.