I recently did a halfway decent bootleg remix of Frou Frou – Let Go that I thought I’d share here.

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I guess this will be the first thing I actually tagged with my “music name”: KnowLogik. I’ve had this name kicking around for a while (couple years at this point I think) but I’m going to more seriously use it. Over the next few months as I continue to try and be disciplined and work on music I’m planning on taking that placeholder site and turning it into a new blog/repository for whatever stuff I work on.

Anyway, a little bit about the remix. First off I’ll say that the original song is really great by itself and I hope this isn’t taken as an afront by any Imogen Heap fans. But, I always thought a faster, dancey-er version of this song would be good so I gave it a shot. To this end I used Ableton Live 7 (including Operator) and Native Instruments Battery 3 as my weapons of choice.

As always when working with existing audio in Live I began by warping the track. I was surprised at the amount of subtle tempo drift the song had… It certainly wasn’t as bad as some tracks but there were a few tricky parts. The original song has a deceptively fast BPM; around 138. I took it up to 155 which is pretty fast but it still sticks together.

Once I had the timestretching locked down I turned my attention to EQ’ing out (as best I could) some of the drums. This is really an art and I spent a lot of time on this, especially because I need the practice. Eventually what I settled on was two EQ8s; a notch and low shelf. The effect of both was minimal but really helped the drums I’d later add to sit in the mix properly. I didn’t want to completely remove the drums from the original track, especially because there were a few really cool reverse snares that needed to be brought out even more.

Then I recorded the drum parts using Battery 3 as my drum sampler. At first I just used a stock kit which sounded awful, just to get the drums basically to hang. Eventually I went back and fixed up the samples and settings to get it all to blend a bit better, rather than just sound like it was sitting on top. The hihats were the hardest to get. They were way too bright at first, then when I darked them down it just kind of sounded like a mess. I got around this by bringing in some light distortion and bit crunching to make it sound a little more low-fi. It might sound counter intuitive but with the smooth vocals and strings the contrasting graininess of the drums really meshes well because it’s distinctive enough to not sound like noise-soup but also took the brightness down on the hats and snares. That was my thinking at least.

From a song structure standpoint I did chop up the entire original track but ended up sticking with the original layout. It had a nice flow to it, the length was right and I liked the low-key transitions I was able to put in. I toyed around with doing more rearranging and looping but in the end I felt like I was trying to do it just for the sake of doing it and it wasn’t necessary.

I then turned to effects envelopes. The vocals are really the strength of this song and it would have been kind of stupid to try and get too crazy on them so I wanted them to remain largely the same. However I did find a few things to do to make it a bit more interesting. First off, I put in some small tempo changes over time at the begining and end of the track. They’re gradual and happen when there aren’t any drums so it’s almost a little bit hard to notice that it’s there, which I like. I also added a rapid “cutting” in a couple places, right as the initial beat drops and then at the transition right around 1:40. There is also a LFO that modulates the panning for the whole track but it’s very small (except for a few sections where it does ramp up a bit). Also it’s in phase and tempo-sync’d so what it actually does is give a very small “ducking” effect in time with the hats and snare. The LFO also modulates a phaser effect that (especially if you’re wearing headphones) should make it sound like the vocals are kind of swimming around inside your head.

I guess that was more than a little bit of info but one reason I like discussing it is so that other people who might have an interest in this stuff can read it and get some ideas. I know I’ve had plenty of good ones from reading other blog posts or just doing a lot of listening.