How I Did It
Ana (cinematrik's smooth dub)by cinematrik
Samples are used in:
more...Tools I Used
Logic, Battery, Dash of Live, my UAD-1 plugs, etc...plus Logic's delay plugs (tape delay. stereo delay)
Samples I Used
Used the Vocal samples and some of the instrumental samples from "Ana". I sampled the bass but re-chopped it up to work in the new tempo. I also stuck some of the guitar in there with big delays.
Original Samples
I created the drums and the atmosphere part from software instruments and loops.
Process
Well the first thing I had to figure out was what tempo I wanted it to be at, and how could it work. I essentially doubled the original tempo. Then I had to change the feel of the bass and the vox especially since the original is that sweet lazy reggae type vibe that unfortunately wouldn't quite work at double speed.
Then just started building up loops in Logic until I got stuff that I liked. A friend clued me in on a cool thing - you can open Live via rewire and have it communicate with Logic - which turns out to be a great way to audition loops since Live will play a loop in time with it's seqeuncer. So I would go through some of my sample CD loops and just audition them in time with my Logic project to find something that had the feel I was looking for. Pretty cool. In the end the drums are a combination of battery programming (kik, snare, bongos) and a couple loops that sort of give it a pretty full sound.
The main sort of instrumental riff was made with Logic's electric piano modeler, then run through 2 different compressors and reverb and delay to kind of give it an older sound.
The synth atmosphere is 3 different layers - 1 from Pro-53 and 2 from Absynth. The dulcimer sound is programmed from the world music jam pack. It's just the sampler version of a dulcimer tho and not one of the loops.
This track obviously is heavy on the delay to give it that downtempo vibe. Logic's tape delay is great for that stuff as well. It's hard to overdo it with this style...
Another (maybe?) interesting thing is that the bass is actually made up of 2 different elements, part of it is cut up samples from Ana, and part of it is a synth bass from a plug in. They blend together pretty well I think in the end result.
And of course in the mixing stages I use a lot of compression on the different tracks. I also picked up this trick from theivery corp - they tend to pick a drum track and then reverse the phase on either the left or the right side to get this crazy stereo sound. In Logic it's pretty easy to do - just open up the Gain plug in the helper menu and it lets you reverse phase or sum to mono etc.
I also end up using a lot of "special sauce" on the mix bus including eq's, the Logic multiband compressor and the UAD limiter just to get it louder and not sound overcompressed.
Other Notes
This was a lot of fun to work on - I knew once I heard the original track that I would end up doing this sort of a remix on it since it just seemed to fit pretty well.
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