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How I Did It

Too Young
by Admiral Bob
Recommends (25)
Wed, Jul 14, 2010 @ 9:46 PM

Samples are used in:

 

Tools I Used

Wavosaur, Reaper, M-Audio Keystudio, StringZ, Fender Stratocaster, BOSS DR-880.

Samples I Used

SackJo's untethered and the vocal for Too Young.

Original Samples

All the instrument parts you hear - guitars, bass, keys.

Process

Well my very first step was to do a whole other remix in an acoustic motif that I scrapped. No sense describing that in any detail.

On this, my second attempt, I began with a very hard to hear string pad: mostly to ensure I got the chord progression down right.

I didn't use the original piano, and that's not out of vanity. It was just a little too busy for the floating mystery I wanted to create. So I added a more lingering piano.

I put down a long lingering fretless bass, and then I began to build a wall of Phil Manzanera style guitars. The challenge with that is that I wanted lots of open space in the song, so the sum total of the three guitars still had to be sparing.

Lastly, I used lots of fades and careful placements of multiple copies of "untethered" opening to bend it into the song. untethered is in Ab and this is in Eb, which is next door neighbours in the circle of fifths, so this wasn't too hard to do... lots of careful positioning and fading.

I then spent some time on snowflake's voice. I used compressors, ping pong delay, and EQing to reduce the impact of the mic saturation, and to bring out the intimate aspects of her voice, because of course this is a very personal song.

Then a careful mastering process... balancing everything from a spectral analysis, and a fairly aggressive but careful compression, designed to put some power into the song, without robbing it of dynamics.

Other Notes

I've remixed everything on "Open", and I didn't really want to touch this one. It means too much time on one artist. But what is remixing if not, as Victor puts it, a "gift economy?" You should give people what they really want.

So I hope I've created something for the 19th that will do.