Well, this is my first song using Logic Pro X. It was an assignment for my Master’s studies asked by my teacher Jaime Bermúdez. He wanted us to do a remix from an original song of which we could find the separate stems. Do you want to see the project?
You can see the video of it and read about it in this post:
PRODUCING A REMIX WITH LOGIC PRO X
The original song chosen for this work is “Mouche” by the group Banda Magda.
The Stems were found here: https://www.puremix.net/zelab-mixing-contest/zelab-session-7-mouche.html
However, only the vocals and the bass tracks are used in this work. My purpose was not that much to experiment with the song but to practice Logic Pro’s Midi and arrangement tools for future projects.
This is the original song on youtube:
This is again my remix only with the visuals I edited from the original video clip with Final Cut:
ARRANGEMENT OF THE REMIX
The tempo and structure were totally changed but it was done respecting the vocals melody most of the time. The original tempo was changed to a slower one to help give a sadder mood to the song. However, since it was requested for this assignment, I also changed the tempo at the end of the song, making it much faster. Neither of both times is the original tempo. The original tempo is 109 BPMs and the remix starts at 94B PMs and ends at 104 BPMs.
There was a request of transposition, so I turned the whole song from A minor to Bb minor during the last rounds of the chorus. It was also asked to use the Flex Pitch tool, so I changed the tone of the song from a major to a minor tonality. Any note from the vocals that did not fit into the A minor harmonic scale was changed to a closer note that did fit into such scale. The same with the double-bass track.
As for the instrumentation, the emphasis was put on the vocals and the orchestra section. The synths add a little colour sometimes and the drums were kept quite traditional. This is so, because I had to use the MOSI Drummer tool which proved to be very useful to create and mix lots of different loops just with a click.
Following there are other details about that the assignment required to be done with Logic Pro X:
TRANSPOSING INDIVIDUAL NOTES
As I mentioned before, in order to fit all the vocals melodies to the A minor scale, I had to use the Flex Audio and go directly to the dissonant notes one by one:
However, since the changes disappeared if the Flex Audio was in any case disabled, I kept bouncing the audio into a new clip any time I was happy with the changes.
SMART TEMPO
The way in which I used the smart tempo was just to find out the real tempo of the song so I could import the tracks correctly. I selected the option ADAPT and imported a drums track in which the kick could be heard well so Logic Pro had it easy to find the tempo.
That let me learn that the song original tempo is 109 BPM. Then I changed back to the option KEEP and imported the vocals and bass track after removing the drums tracks I had used.
TIME STRETCH
As I mentioned before, I wanted to start the song at 94 BPMs, so I had to slow the many vocals and back vocals clips down so they sounded on time perfectly.
Firstly, I started trying the Flex Audio tools, but because the transients of the vocals were not very useful for Logic to calculate their BPMs, all the vocals clips ended up having different BPMs and it sounded all out of time.
My second try was to use the “time and pitch machine” (you can find it when double clicking the clip and choosing “File” and then “Functions) and to change the tempo of each clip manually:
However, it did not work either and there were clips with very little tempo differences that made them not perfect. Therefore, my third and final strategy was to bounce together all the lead vocal tracks together into just one clip, and do the same for the back vocals. Then I was able to do the tempo changes.
APPLE LOOPS
It was a requirement of the assignment to add an Apple Loop for the remix so I chose the “Deeper Meaning Vox Sample”. It fit perfectly into the vocals mixture of the song and added rhythm to the remix. I chopped it and transposed it when necessary.
TRANSPOSING WHOLE CLIPS
At the end of the song, for last choruses, I transposed the whole song an interval of +1. That gave more energy towards the end of the song until it faded out. I went into every clip I wanted it to be transposed and changed it in the section over the faders:
CREATING ALIAS CLIPS
If you press Alt + Shift while you drag a clip, you create a copy of that clip that will always keep any changes you make to the original one. I made an Alias clip to the Massive Bass line in order to have another track doing the same notes but with a sound layer created with the Alchemy synth.
I do not own neither the original audio tracks by Banda Magda (the vocals and the double-bass ones) nor the images used from their videoclip. IT IS ALL FOR DEMO PURPOSES.