Remix Other People's Music

Previously, I talked about rewriting other people's songs in a different style (see Musical Re-Visioning) as a tool to break out of your box. Another way to break out of the doldrums and get something new going is to remix other people's music.

In the early 90's, I used to do this without really thinking of it as remixing. I would record sound bites on a tape deck, jack it into the Perfect Sound sampler on my Amiga 500, and rip small passages that I later would use in my own "new mixes". Sure, they were gritty, 8-bit samples with WAY too much background music, but they helped stretch my imagination because I was playing with full musical passages, lyrics, and a musical signature that wasn't my own.

Like other techniques I have mentioned here before, remixing is an interesting way to get your hands dirty and come away with not only a new appreciation for the complexity (or simplicity) of the artist's work, but also with more knowledge of how they assembled their beats, how they took simple passages and made a really memorable song, etc. You increase your mental musical database with these snippets that will influence your later original work.

Where To Start
Now with the free-for-all of the web and the change in moods from some artists, you can take this a step further than my early remixing attempts, without all the suffering through poor quality rips of passages and the omnipresent "other music" behind the clips you really want. We are now in a climate where some artists are releasing the bare bones bits-and-pieces of their songs with the intention or creating remixes. A couple artists that are worth noting doing exactly this (separately) are Jay-Z and Nine Inch Nails.

Jay-Z released an acapella version of The Black Album, which immediately encouraged fans and remixers to use his tracks in their own mixes. (The best of the remixes of this has got to be Danger Mouse's "Grey Album", which remixes Jay-Z with The Beatles' "The White Album". It has been banned from official release, which means you can find it all over the web, but can't actually buy it. Find it. Enjoy it.) One downside is that Jay-Z released the acapella version as another commercial album, so there's no free ride here.

Nine Inch Nails has taken another approach, by releasing all the source audio tracks from quite a few of their songs for free download on their site. These are in a variety of formats, including GarageBand, Ableton Live, as well as raw WAV files for people using other programs. They also released the source tracks for EVERY SONG from the album "Year Zero" on their followup remix album "Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D" as enhanced CD content. More recently, they released the source tracks to every song on their latest album "The Slip" on their site. To take it even a step further, they have provided an online community to share your remixes of their material online and to listen to other people's remixes as well. You can find the Nine Inch Nails remix community at http://remix.nin.com.

Drop me a line or post a comment if you have found any other worthwhile artists giving away source material for remixes. It is always fun to see how established artists crafted their songs (and how easily we can take their visions in other directions).