Quote: the mix sounds good but the flow is unsure. It’s hard to tell whether you were going for a club track or a bedroom track. the tempo is just slightly fast. doesn’t make it fit the laid back description you gave it.

I really never try to make a distinction between club and bedroom tracks - I never could be that much rational with these things. I just make the track in a way that pleases me and end it where it seems fit. :) A club track would have to be much longer and a bedroom track would have to be much calmer… so let’s just say this is a bedroom party track.

Anyway, you got a point: it’s not laid back. I meant to say that by using acoustic drums the rhythm isn’t as tight as if I had used electronic sounds 100% quantized to a grid. They’re actual drums - looped, off course, but real. All the slightly off-grid beats add a groove that just woudln’t be there otherwise.

Quote: Whoah whoah whoah…how the hell did you get those vocals so clean? Were the pellas posted somewhere?


Well, the "uncleanness" of the vocals was the biggest problem to do this mix, but I stumbled on the solution almost by chance. I edit my samples on Wavelab and it has this option Edit -> Copy to new window -> Subtract channels (or something quite close to this, I’m at work now and can’t check the menu). It basically takes one of the stereo channels, inverts its signal and sums it with the other one.

In practice, this makes everything that appears on both channels at once (in other words, all the "mono" sounds) to vanish. It was not a perfect transformation though: if you listen closely you’ll note that one of the voices is gone along with the drums and the bass, but it sounds good enough.

I had done this sort of thing with other editing programs before - i had just forgotten to try it. Wavelab only automates this. To do this on, say, Audacity, simply separate the stereo channels in two mono tracks, invert one of them (invert != reverse) and then mix them back together to mono. Voilà!

OK. I’m familiar with that technique, I guess I’m just baffled as to how you did it so well. I have a really hard time eliminating the bass and the claps on 2 and 4, yet your vocal track seems to be completely clean. That’s what I can’t figure out.

Quote: OK. I’m familiar with that technique, I guess I’m just baffled as to how you did it so well. I have a really hard time eliminating the bass and the claps on 2 and 4, yet your vocal track seems to be completely clean. That’s what I can’t figure out.


Maybe it’s because I did this using an uncompressed track ripped directly from the Wired CD. The MP3 compression adds a lot of crosstalk between the channels and it really shows when you do this sort of thing.