This is for all of you who want to do your 'own' remixes/ arrangements of a Queen tracks.
First of all:
The term 'remix' differs from person to person.
Some people will say remixing is taking samples from an original track and re-arranging them into your own interpretation. Having spent the last few years hanging around 'video-game' music mixers; some of them will argue that you must include at least 50% original material.
You could argue either case until you're blue in the face. Neither is right and neither is wrong.
Again, going back to the first line in the post; it differs from person to person. Take Fatboy Slim's 'Praise You' for example. He took a song, took samples from it then added his own touches to it. Bass lines, drums samples and arrangement of the sections of the song.
This could be called a remix and/ or an arrangement.
Same goes to 'House of the Rising Sun'.
Many people will know the version by Eric Burdon and the Animals and some will know Frijid Pink and even Rolf Harris' version of it. Originally it was done done by Woody Guthrie; these artist merely 'covered' it or if your like, 'arranged' it to suit their own styles.
So people here:
The terms 'remixing', 'arranging' and 'covering' are vague at best.
Personally, I would say a cover is something that you or, you and your band has perfomed - with very few changes.
An arrangement you could class as something that should sound like the original but with your own touches and some original parts in it.
As for remixes, both of the above are and aren't remixes. As I mentioned before, remixing is loose term and could be applied to anything from adding your own parts, taking away or simply re-arranging what's already there. Again, it varies from person to person.
Having gone through all that, I strongly urge all Queen fans & musicians in general to make their won interpretations of Queen songs.
Some software you could try include:
Fruity Loops
Reason
Guitar Pro (particularly good for guitarists & bassists)
Cubase
Cakewalk
VST Instruments (more realistic soundind generally quite expensive):
Steinberg Virutal Guitar
Edirol Orchestral
Gerritan Personal Orchestra
Resources: link
MIDI is your friend. If you want to try re-arranging a Queen track in your own style but can't afford pro-gear, hammersound.net offers a lot of very good 'soundfonts' for your useage. If you've got a soundfont compatible soundcard, you can load different instruments into you default sound bank. Just experiment around!
Hope this helps some... er, people.
Any questions, just ask.
Thanks for the heads up on remixing! Just out of curiosity, I wonder how people who use parts of different songs for their remixes seem to be able to isolate for instance just the vocals or guitar.
It's almost as if they have access to the original multi-tracks, which of course I don't believe for a second. Any tips 'n' tricks?
I'd imagine that there are karaoke/ acapella tracks out there. For obvious reasons having these available to you makes life a damn site easier.
There is a way/ are ways to rip vocals of a track explained here: link
Bascially it involves having the original track and the exact same track but without the vocals on it, paste them together and so on so hopefully the music will be cancelled out and you'll be left with the vocals.... and lots of other boring techie stuff.
In short though, this isn't perfect and you're never going to have an exact rip of the vocals.
The only other way you could do this (this applies for ripping out certain parts/instruments etc) is to use the graphic equalizer to cancel out certain frequencies. Again you're not going to get perfect results and you're going to need a hell of a lot of patience.
Sorry I can't really be more helpful than that...
You've been more than helpful, thanks.
I'm going tot try the vocal extraction thingy as soon as possible, I own the Queen karaoke CD's so I have some songs on which I can try this.
Thanks again!
Just thought of something...
If you're using Cool Edit & you've got the karaoke track, you could try:
- Load up the karaoke track & select it all
- go to Noise Reduction -> get profile from selection & save it. When you preview it, you should (in theory) get scilence.
- Load up the track with vocals then go back to Noise Reduction -> Load profile (the one you've just saved) and fiddle about with the reduction level.
Hell knows if this works or not but in theory it's the same sort of thing I mentioned before.
Another tip: I've made some remixes of another of my favourite bands, The Cure, done with the centre channel of the 5.1 mixes of one of their live DVDs (the only one that has real 5.1) which has a very clean voice and just a few bits of the drums. There are some (free) softwares that can extract individual channels off a DVD audio track, and if it was really (re)mixed in 5.1 (a must), much likely you'll end up getting the clean vocals and a bit of drums and/or bass (bass drum mostly and occasional snares) if isolating the centre channel. Usually if there isn't too many extra sounds left with the voice it's not that hard to recreate the drums (MIDI is your best friend here) or add a new beat on top of that, better than try to add stuff on top of the original studio track. There are some Queen audio DVD rips that are very useful for that... including one of AOBTD.
With Queen stuff, the most complicated part once you get the vocal extracts are probably recreating the guitar parts (with MIDI it will suck as it is mostly distorted and guitar sounds in MIDI aren't that good - realistic - mostly if distorted), but if you get some instrumental parts with the same basic riffs these can be saved as a loop or something.
My remixes (all done with FL Studio) are at link
Once I tried something with we will rock you a capella (I think it's still there for download in my page, I used some of the Rick Rubin mixes as a starting point) and also I was born to love you from the FM boxset (piano and voice), but this one must be splitted in several parts or the tempo is a bit lost in the middle of it. And that's it.
I make all of my remixes with FruityLoops and a capellas. The hardest part is matching up the bpm's. Once you figure the proper rate, you're free to take the song wherever you want.