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These days, it's not always easy to define what a remix actually is. (© Image Source/Corbis)

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Remixes have been around ever since the dawn of recorded music. Early producers and engineers stripped down multitrack recordings, either to transform them from one genre to another, or to rescue a well-written but not so well-produced track from the bin.

These days, the definition of a remix has loosened somewhat as technology has raced towards the powerhouses that are our modern DAWs. Technically, a remix could be as small a change as a new mono or surround sound-compatible version of an originally-stereo recording, or as wild as a scarcely recognisable new track with a few subtle elements derived from the original.

Whatever kind of remix you plan to produce, the following 18 tips will help you to do it better. For a complete guide to the art if remixing, check out the Autumn issue of Computer Music (CM157), which is on sale now.

Chop and choose

If some ideas from the original song aren't working, try leaving those bits out. You'll have to make a real effort to decide which parts you can truly afford to lose, but if you've chosen the right genre for your remix, you should be confident that the main elements of the original will work in your new style. Typically, a modern dance remix of a heavily vocal-lead track will discard most of the vocals, only keeping a key phrase or chorus.

It's not the right time

Sometimes you might want your resulting remix to work in a genre that dictates a whole different time signature. If, for example, you were to try to force a waltz-like 3/4 ballad into a trance track, you'd be in trouble. Rather than forcefully superimposing one time signature onto another, try keeping the approximate melody and changing a few notes to adapt it to the new time.

Breakdown cover

Although you've got to remain faithful to the genre you're remixing into, you can use breakdowns as an excuse to make more liberal statements. These are also useful places to respect the original content. For example, an electro house track needs its drop, but there's nothing to stop you from breaking down to a completely different tempo in order to wedge in a sample of a metal or hip-hop record (or whatever you happen to be remixing).

Speed kills

Statistically speaking, dance remixes tend to be a lot faster than the original tracks. If you're working with a particularly slow song, remixing into a super-fast genre or both, try running the sample at half-speed, relative to the genre you're doing. For example, it might be easier to use a 110bpm hip-hop sample in a 200bpm breakcore remix by first slowing down the hip-hop sample to 100bpm.

Out of concert

Is your sample in concert pitch? If you've ever struggled to find the right tuning of a sample - ie, you're never able to find the same key with your sequencer - you might have a recording that's not in concert pitch. Essentially, this means that the pitch is offset by less than a semitone and thus will always sound detuned against in-tune instruments. The solution is to fine-tune it using cents. Make sure you tune all samples so that they're in concert pitch before you start your remix.

Timing is everything

If you're having trouble with a loosely timed sample, try cutting it up into sections first. Once you have the sample in manageable chunks, you can experiment with a range of different methods to tighten the timing up. For example, timestretching can sometimes be appropriate, but other times it just won't sound right. You might find certain phrases can be cut into sections that can be sequenced into time, or that brushing up just a few dodgy edits with timestretching does the trick.

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