How I Did It
Tools I Used
Albeton 7, Stylux RMX, DirectWave, WAVES
Samples I Used
Besides the ccM sample pool I grabbed the kick, cross-stick, ride and various percussion from Stylus/Rex libraries I have lying around.
Original Samples
Wha guitar
Process
This mix started life as a 16 bar groove, pretty busy actually. I started with a stock drum loop and the Trifonic bass part from Broken. Both sliced and triggered by midi patterns.
Soon after that I was happy to realize that I was a few BPM and very close in workable chord changes to the Kristin pell so I laid that in and started tweaking the groove, the chord changes and sliding the vocal bits around to land on the downbeats until it all worked in time/harmony. This was the sketch I hung everything else on.
I then started replacing the initial stock drum loop by removing the midi triggers for those parts and programming separated parts (deep kick, cross-stick, etc.) programming variations along the way.
As I was peeling back the drums I realized the original bass loop was way too busy for the first 2/3rds of the song so I went back and radically reduced the amount of the notes, leaving the "busy" part for the long coda (where I rearranged the pattern a fair amount).
I then added a bunch of distortion to the bass to dirty it up, get it real farty.
Took a couple of thumb-piano single-shot samples from the Berklee sample pool (the Forsyth collection) and dropped those into Live's sampler. There was only 4 'usable' notes but I managed to re-pitch and combine them so that they supported the chords implied by the Trifonic bass line. I rolled off the attack quite a bit so they didn't sound too "donk!"
Laid down a guitar riff that took a couple of iterations to get that sliding between chord changes. The bass line really only has 2 chords in it but made it sound like several more on the gtr by messing with voicings (a sus here, a 7th there). I recorded it direct so I added a kind of U2/She Moves distortion via Live's stock FX.
I put in legato strings that matched the guitar voicings and added an f-wad of fx to give the whole mix a more ethereal feel (chorus, delay, reverb, resonators)
About this time Loveshadow posted the stems to Sunrise/Twitch mix and I grabbed the synth/keys track. It was in a different BPM and the chords (Ebmaj7, Dmi7 I think) where totally out but that just meant more work ;)
I spent a fair amount of time cutting and re-pitching the synth part (sometimes at 1/8th intervals) until things really start to take shape. (He even had a sliding riff in his turnaround that matched my gtr slide!) Whenever I'm doing this kind of thing, the goal is not to have harmonic clashes that I wouldn't have thought of (i.e. can't hear). It's the only time I allow myself to use 'hunt and peck' composing/arranging as opposed to singing or hearing the parts first.
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