A friend of mine, guitarist in an indie band really liked my beats and asked me if I can do a remix of one of their songs. They are a classic band with acoustic drums, guitars etc. and I’ve been telling him for ages that they should experiment with electronic sound. He never took me seriously until he heard one of my live jam recordings(that’s what I usually do) and how powerful it sounded especially in the drum / bass department compared to the wonky acoustic drums they use.
So far so good… he gave me the stems of the song in question, I time-stretched it ITB from 100 to 113 bpm and chopped a handful of 4 bar phrases that constitute the structure of the song, mainly the vocal. There are also some guitar phrases that alternate in the verse and chorus parts and some ambient pads.
Here comes the tricky part - to figure out what type of sound I’ll go I made 3-4 different patterns that use some of the phrases but are also jammable for a longer time by muting and un-muting, classic hardware/electronic music style of open-ended performance. But as soon as I tried to bring them in some form of song structure it became really apparent my approach wouldn’t work. When I analysed the original song, I managed to distinguish something along 16 bars verse, 8 bars pre-chorus and 16 bars chorus. So in order to make the verse I need 4x4bar vocal phrases chained one after another.
That means that the live muting-unmuting thing will do only for the intro and outro and everything else should be pre-programmed and chained, pattern after pattern, which more or less excludes the possibility doing a live performance out of it.
What would you do in such case - would you abandon the song structure BS and go for a good old jam, again with several different patterns, but more open-ended, like a journey through some different scenes/moods, vocal snippet here and there and relying more on performing, doing ctrl-all etc. or you would take the challenge and try to really structure a song? How to make it easier?
After I laid my general ideas for type of sound and feel, I was thinking of going back and laying the structure only using the 4 bar vocal phrases (4 pttns verse, 2 pttns pre-chorus and 4 ptnns chorus), then fill in the rest of the sounds and then copy the whole lot once again and make some small alterations for the second round of the verse-chorus combo.
I like the challenge but then the outcome would be only pressing play and letting it run, which is not completely my thing… Also can you chain patterns from several banks? I never thought I might need Overbridge, but it would’ve been really helpful to have in that case.
Give me your input, have you done something like this, only on the DT? How would you approach it? Hope I managed to convey my slight frustration:) Cheers!