Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I am doing this tutorial on a craptop with tiny speakers. This may sound different on a PC with great sound. Don’t be afraid to adjust the key that the tutorial is in. Simply press ctrl+a then drag all your notes up or down. In the last issue, we had our first part of our remix down. You saw how it took shape, even when the individual notes and tracks sounded like they did not belong. You saw a little ‘reverb’ go a long way. You saw how to slice ‘n dice a pattern. Before we continue messing with our song, I want you to think about a lot of modern songs. There is usually a build-up of some kind before the melody starts. Off the top of my head, think of Kate Ryan’s Ella elle l’a …. mmmm Kate Ryan… Sorry, got carried away. As the song starts, there is like a noise build-up, that sounds like white noise, quickly increasing in volume. If you don’t know what I am referring to, here is a refresher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdJN0ss7jA0 - we will now be adding the second part of the melody today as well as a build-up.
Since we are making a remix, the sky is the limit. Okay, open your project from the last issue. Find and drag the harpsichord into your song editor. Wait, what? Yes, we are going to have some fun? Bach to the future!!! This may seem like a bad idea, but roll with it. Harpsichord has an ‘ugly’ metal-feel to it, and that is just what we need to fit with our industrial theme. Click on the word “harpsichord01.ogg” to open the instrument’s general settings. Click on ENV/LFO. Let us ‘soften’ the instrument a bit (set all three “volume”, “cutoff”, “reso”.) Bring ‘DEC’ down slightly, bring ‘REL’ down slightly, and increase ‘AMT’ to the max. Bring its volume down to about 20%. See (Fig.1); *Unmodified is on the left. There is a method to the madness; by changing the volume as well, it becomes green, so, when I open it, I can immediately see which ones I have edited. Now open the piano roll for the instrument. In the original song at about one minute fifty seconds (1:50), there is a little riff that plays at a higher pitch. See if you can recreate it. If not, don’t despair, simply see (Fig.2 - next page). The pattern is simply repeated twice with a slight ‘twist’ at the end of the second repeat.
Let’s create that “intro” to our tune. Drag the ‘breath01’ instrument to your song editor. Click on the name to bring up the general settings and click the reversed ‘R’ to reverse your sample. The second knob is the starting point. Adjust it just past halfway. We don’t want to wait forever for our sample to start playing. Now go to ENV/LFO and - their AMT knob to maximum. Now we open the piano roll and paint our note at precisely C5. There is a catch here. The higher the note goes, the shorter it gets. At C5, the note lasts precisely one bar (well, it does on my system). Which is what you need to glide into the tune. Feel free to shorten or lengthen your sample if you don’t seem to get this working. I will include a picture of mine (fig.3). Now select all of your music in your song editor and drag it one block to the right. This open space is where the one note of breath fits in (fig.4). Intro… Check (fig.4)
How are you doing so far? Keeping up? Great! Now I want you to copy-and-paste what you have to finish the song. We will put the finishing touches on what we have – after you have done that. So if you completed the task of filling in the entire song, you may have noticed that something seemed off. That is because, in the second stanza, the pitch shifts one octave up. That means it went from c4 to c5. There are also minor changes to accommodate this and draw your attention to it. If you compensated by just moving your notes up, well done! If you look at the loop bar (the ruler on top), the issue is at about thirty seven (37). I have included mine as a screen shot, but if you like yours more, stick with that (fig.5). Then, around forty-one (41), for the next two “four-blockers”, you can copy mine that is one (to C5) key up (fig.6). I also expanded my ‘snaps’ all the way to the beginning. There is a lot of copy / pasting going on here, but it is because a melody and chorus get repeated several times in the duration of a normal song. You can not just repeat the same thing over and over, you need to zhuzh it up. For example: Let us take the second high pitched riff in this song, because it is a ‘remix’ we are making, we have some artistic license. Open your harpsichord and go to FUNC. Turn on ARPEGGIO, and change the direction to ‘down’ and the mode to ‘sort’. Try to set the time button as close to 333 (mine is at 332) as you can. Now, when you play the riff, there is almost another note in, after every third one, and there is some artistic style added without you having to think about it! The main melody is still there and is still recognisable, but you have now added your own spin without adding a note yourself.
At the end of the tune, you will hear a long sustained note, and the tune from the beginning playing over it. The drums end in a cymbal smash. As an exercise, I am going to let you go through the instruments to find a compatible cymbal sound. This will help you get familiar with your instruments. You can also create your own sounds with the triple oscillator, but that is another tutorial. As our tune is rough, I will help you smooth out the transitions and harmonies. We do not want to lose our ‘crunchiness’, but we want our tune to sound a bit more professional. When I say this I don’t mean for you to copy everyone else; be an individual, blaze across the sky like a shooting star! Now that we are done with the instruments, so to speak, let’s add some voices. If you want to sing the song, be my guest, however… I want to add some background “aaahs”. Yes, I know we went past ten instruments, but when I started this tutorial, I wasn’t going to make the tune so full, I was just planning on teaching you the basics with a beat, base, clap, hat, organ, and some automation. Now I am aiming to take you a little further. Grab chorus01 from the instrument panel and drop it in your song editor. (Do not double-click it, as that adds it to the beats & bassline editor). Add maximum reverb to it. (By now, you should know how. HINT: c*2×2). Now, according to the manual, we need to change the note type to “last note” (truth: Chord/scale/note - at the top of the piano roll has never made any difference in the songs I make). This pattern is going to fall over two screenshots as well (fig8 & fig 9). Our chorus now harmonizes with the tune. We will cover scales and chords in another issue. Bring the chorus volume down to 20-25%. These will fit in nice & snug below the first ‘riff’ that repeats three times (fig.10).
Now that we have touched on so many subjects, I need to point out something very obvious. So far we have been working with notes that are all the same volume. You may have adjusted the volume in the song editor or the note editor. Just know, you have full control over each note inside the piano roll. Below the piano keys in the piano roll, you will see the words “note volume” or “note panning”. Clicking the one, will change it to the other. The green stalks with the cyan dots are the individual note volumes. You can adjust a row of notes, simply by dragging over them. This works like someone playing the piano, if you have noticed them stepping on the pedals. Remember, in any piece, some notes are played louder than others. Though not always detectable, you can immediately hear the absence thereof (fig.7).
There is one thing I did not mention, and that is the FX-mixer. Though we did all our instruments to channel 0 (MASTER), it is generally a bad idea. We can go there in the next tutorial, I just did not want to overload you. We can then look at automation and how to control clipping in your songs. All in the FX-mixer. This is where I leave you. You have 90% of a gritty, grimy remix of a simple tune. How you finish it depends on your taste in music. Change the tempo of the tune if you like. Turn it into Dubstep. The limit is your imagination! Use what I have taught you, and next time we will look into more topics, when we remix something completely different. Do you have a suggestion as to what we should remix next? E-mail us on: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org