Because I’ve been nerding out about music lately, I now have a frankly ridiculous number of plug-ins for my Digital Audio Workstations, which do all sorts of cool things. One useful one is called Ozone, from Izotope, which listens to your current audio project and then does an automatic rebalancing of levels of every instrument and voice. Whether you like the automatic rebalancing is a matter of taste, of course, but you can tweak it from there, and from experience I can say it does a pretty decent job of de-muddy-fying tracks, particularly older tracks of mine which I made years and years ago and mostly sound a little dull, production-wise.
Which brings us to our two tracks today, which are almost 20-year-old remixes of songs from popular artists, using loops and stems which I then put my own bits onto, and which I’ve now remastered using modern tech. The first one is “Don’t Stop,” which takes the opening piano bit from Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” and then slathers a bunch of sampled electronica around it. Purists will be appalled.
The second one is my remix of the Depeche Mode song “I Feel Loved,” the stems of which were offered up for a remixing contest back in, oh, geez, 2002 or so. My remix did not win, I am sad to say, but it was still fun to do. I can say I collaborated with Depeche Mode! Kind of! Sort of!
Also, yes, I did a lot of sample-based fiddling about with music around the turn of the century and then, having put together an album’s worth of stuff, then stopped doing it for most of a couple of decades. This was coincident with, you know, my career as a novelist taking off. Priorities, I suppose. It’s nice to be getting back to it a little bit more (also, I will still keep writing novels, promise).
— JS
