Sunday 9 March 2008

RMX WKND

We've had some flirtation with management recently, this has opened up some avenues that are interesting for NK, however it's not stopping us plow forward with our album. The 2nd round of vocal recording is next weekend. Sarah is stopping over so we are gonna cram as much in as possible. This should see us with around seven complete songs with just the mixing and final arrangements to tweak.

So this weekend I had some time to work on a remix for one of "the managements" artists. This artist has some pedigree and also chart success, hopefully the fruits of my labour will make it on to their forthcoming single.

The original track was 115bpm, my version is 125bpm and uses the sound set for one of our new songs. This has given it the NK branded feel. The track has been completely reworked with only the vocals surviving. The vocals were treated with Logics' in built time stretch engine so I could get them working at the new bpm without altering the pitch. I remember the first hardware Sampler I had that could do that the Akai S1100, I think it could only manage around 32 seconds though and you ended up with something quite robotic sounding. The Akai samplers also had a really cool feature that would allow you to shorten a sample loop on the fly. I used that effect loads back in my first band. I also showed Bon from Nitzer Ebb that feature and low and behold it ended up on a remix they did of their track called "Captivate" :-)

Think I'm gonna buy myself a Little Fatty, the Moog analogue stage synth. Normally for live, the parts I play come from soft synths triggered within Logic but the new stuff is pretty complicated and I'm noticing a small amount of latency. Plus I'm always on the edge when it comes to using Logic live. I might have to render parts to audio stems for the next gigs and disable all of the AU soft synths.

OK so it's Sunday evening and one of my favorite non sci-fi flms is on, Crash.

Matt

3 comments:

SarahNK said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
SarahNK said...

Yeah - gotta say, I've heard the remix that Matt's working on for the 'mystery' artist and it is fantastiche. The unmistakable NK vibe is there - in fact, I don't think I realised what a strong sound we had until I heard it 'out of context' if you know what I mean. Things are certainly hotting up.
I wrote another track for our album at the weekend called 'goodbye'. I was feeling a little bit melancholy and it was nice to write something more personal - as a lot of the other tracks are a bit of a social commentary. I also made some spicy autumn chutney, which was very exciting. Who needs Ibiza when you've got chutney.

Bring it on NK!!!!!!!!!!!

Northern Kind said...

NB

You will be able to buy our NK branded Chutney at the next few gigs.