Fadr and SoundCloud sent me a somewhat spammy email inviting me to take part in a remix event for the song “God speed” by Erin LeCount. I gave in, built a track, and submitted it. Listen and vote on the event site.
I’d never heard of Erin before, but this is a great song, with a very impressive vocal performance. I’ve not done much in the way of remixing, but I have done many cover versions, so I decided to combine aspects of both. Working in Apple’s Logic Pro X as usual, I kept the song’s original structure and vocals, but completely replaced the backing track. Much of the marketing pitch for this event was about using Fadr’s “AI remix” tools, but I’m not really very interested in that.
I made two main edits to the vocals: picking the “god speed” line from later in the song and using it as the opening line, then overlaying the opening verse on top of the final one. The first verse is longer than the second, so there were some vocals left over to make a new ending. While the event provided stems, broken out into 18 tracks, these were not completely isolated. For example, the first half of the main vocal track is quite dry, but the second half has a ton of reverb on it, making it harder to reprocess. This was quite convenient though as the dry vocal made for a better ending. It’s very nice working with such good, real vocals, but they are much harder work to edit, and I can’t randomly change the lyrics and melody like I can with Synthesizer V!
I replaced each instrumental track in turn with my own version, and I found some good equivalents to the existing tracks, though some of the odder sounds like bow screeches were difficult to emulate, so I either left them or dropped them.
The keyboard part had some chord voicings I couldn’t figure out, so ended up using Excite Audio’s VISION 4X plugin (a very detailed audio spectrum analyser!) to figure out what notes and harmonics I needed by trial and error!
I replayed the electric guitar part, and really liked the recording, so I added more of it elsewhere in the track. Then I wanted a line that would hold everything together, for which I added a full-length acoustic guitar track using UJAM’s Amber2. Drums are played by Logic’s player with manual patterns, using the “Detroit Garage” kit with some modifications, notably a pitched-up snare, and a 40% “pull” on the feel. Bass and sub-bass tracks use Apple’s Alchemy synth. The electric and toy pianos, harp, and reverse synth hit are Logic sampler patches, a second electric piano uses Kontakt 8. Reverbs are all Logic Space Designer patches.
Overall it has come out sounding like something a college band would play at a student union gig, hence the choice of title.
This was a fun exercise. Some of the other remixes were rather more ambitious in rearranging, changing pace, or transforming it into other styles (like disco and breakbeat), but I’m pretty happy with what I produced.
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