Peer Remix

For my peer remix I chose to use Nikki’s piano song and Laura’s midi song. Laura accidentally gave me a different song, but rather than take more time I just pulled a few things out of what she gave me and merged them with Nikki’s piece from which I just kept/rearranged the piano parts. I chose their tracks because they had aesthetic elements that I liked, but were put together differently than I would have done it myself.

The process started with me singling out each track getting rid of loops and midi tracks that I didn’t want to use then searching through the loop library to find things that I wanted to use. Initially I pulled out ten or so loops. I ended up using five consistently and taking a single beat from two others to make.

Because there was already a basic structure, after laying down a beat (the whispy, echo beat that we discussed in class as being made by eq) , I started in the middle rearranging, lengthening and shortening the piano parts. I then layered in additional elements to the beat because the first loop wasn’t heavy enough for me and I wanted more and different textures in other areas of the piece. Next I added a build up to silence followed by everything coming in at once, but quickly coming down to a less complicated sound. I also knew i wanted a drop, but couldn’t easily find one that I liked and making one was taking a while, so I next completed the ending and came back to the drop.

After asking how to best accomplish my idea, which was a drum explosion/repetition and then degradation of the piano part into nothing. I found two beats with a heavy drum beat and cut a beat out of each repeated each a bunch of time successively then added the piano after it. I ended up shortening the length of both the drum and the piano (although I probably could have shortened the piano section even more), and deleted a few of the drum beats to vary the rhythm. I then looped the piano section and using the master track features of garage band did both a time and pitch shift from the current down to the lowest either would allow. I then bounced the loop, deleted the section, time and pitch changes from the actual track, and dropped the loop in in the sections place. This did not turn out exactly how I wanted.

The only why for any of my choices was just that those were the ideas I had as I was working with the music and working with those ideas I made them sound as best I could in the time we had with the tools I was using. Overall, I liked how the piece turned out, but as usual it would have been nice to spend more time on it.

As to who should be credited for the piece, as we discussed in class that is a complicated decision. I think as long as it is labelled as a remix of Nikki’s my name could be the main name, because it is drastically different from hers, but still uses many of her original ideas. The loop I pulled from Laura’s piece was one that she recorded, but I didn’t take any thematic material from her piece, so I’m not sure I would credit her, unless I credited everyone/thing that I used a loop from.