My Laurie Anderson Remix

My Laurie Anderson Remix

Just some thoughts on my remix: http://www.indabamusic.com/submissions/show/18601

This is my first experience with indabamusic, and I’m liking it a lot. Nice site, nice people. I’d love to read more posts like this one talking about how other remixers get their sound. Perhaps this will get the ball rolling.

I did the whole song sequenced with plugins, but tried to make it sound like it’s possible that it’s a real band. I wanted to make people wonder.

I played every instrument independently, and tried to give each different player a unique personality. You can hear a bit of that in the baritone sax guy, who’s playing louder than the rest of the section, and he gets carried away sometimes and pushes the tempo; also, the lead trumpet guy likes playing shakes at the end of phrases.

I slowed down the song about 12 bpm from the original. The vocal stretched pretty well, except for some of the “S”s, which sometimes sound like she’s lisping. To correct this, I went in and cut some good “S”s from other words, and then made an “S” track, where I positioned the good “S”s over the bad ones. This worked, mostly.

I sped up the choruses to be slightly faster than the verses. It’s subtle, but it’s there. I thought the choruses needed just a bit more “push” to them.

I changed a lot of tracks to mono. I’ve found that especially with piano, it can be distracting to have the whole piano spread out in the stereo field. I also made the drums mono, for the same reason–I didn’t want the drums surrounding the listener, with high hats and toms panned all over the place. I wanted the instruments to sound like they’re coming from a single location, as though it’s possible that the song was recorded with a single microphone, or a closely positioned pair.

At the end, the call-response section was supposed to be the lead vocal being echoed vocally by the members of the band. I tried recording response vocals of myself as the band, but it sounded awful, no matter how I processed the vocals, so I changed the response to the cup trumpet, which probably works better anyway.

The weirdest decision I made with this song was the decision to record it to tape, and then back to digital again. It just sounded too bright in the digital mix. I tried recording the final mix to tape over a couple of days with unremarkable results, and then I got a take that I liked and decided to use it. Honestly, I went out and borrowed a commercial tape player, and bought a .99 cent Maxell tape for this project, as an experiment. It isn’t the most hifi recording I’ve ever made, but the tape gave the song a vibe I couldn’t get through plugins or anything else. However, now that I hear the competition, I wonder if I made a mistake, and should have left the mix bright and clear and digital. But the tape version is (in my opinion) much easier to listen to, and resembles music, more than the purely digital mix. I’ve heard recording engineers speak of certain vintage compressors that can “glue” a mix together, but I’ve never experienced this quite as dramatically as when I put this song on tape and heard what that did to the mix. Consequently, there’s some hiss–which would ordinarily drive me nuts–but in this particular case, I like it, and feel it adds character to the recording.

I worked pretty hard not to overcompress the final mix. I decided that in this song, in particular, I needed to preserve the dynamics rather than pump up the loudness. I wanted fullness, without in-your-faceness.

I kind of wanted my song to sound like the original, and for the original to sound like the remix.