Okay, so I was looking around trying to find these old Felix Cartal production lessons online, and realized his website is down. Luckily, good ole’ Google had a copy of this blog post cached entitled: From Monument to Masses Remix: In-Depth, so I was able to save the post and piece it back together here (I hope that’s okay, Taylor! If for any reason you want this taken down, shoot us a line here holler@electric-friends.com. Thanks).
It’s an interesting read even though I’m an Ableton user myself (he uses Reason in this example). I believe Felix still uses Ableton for his live sets, so take that for what it’s worth. It’s an older article, but still lots of valuable info if you’re at all into electronic music production. I predict only the nerds are gonna like this post.
Enjoy this video for Volcano, as well as plenty of producer-nerd porn directly after!
MACHETE: out.
From Monument to Masses Remix: In-Depth
By felix ⋅ February 10, 2009
It’s getting late, but I’ve felt bad about not updating this as consistently as I’ve wanted to, so here goes an in-depth post explaining some of my production processes. First off, I wanted to show a song that I’ve created entirely in Reason 3.0, and I figured my recently released remix of From Monuments to Masses was a good choice (grab the remix HERE if you haven’t already). A little background on the making of this track: I received the stems for the remix right before I left for tour in Europe and was nervous on the deadline for the track. I would have to have it done before the tour was over. Worse, I was going through a really bad spurt of writer’s block before I left. With any luck, I was hoping the change of environment would inspire me. The first half of the trip was the opposite of what I had hoped, countless train-rides of toying away with riffs here and there, but with no real finished product. On the second half of the tour, I stayed with my friend Alan for a bit (some of you may know him as Hostage) and crashed really early one night. The next morning I woke up at 7am, and that’s when it hit me. I threw on my headphones and had the majority of the track done before lunch, and finished it off within the next day. So it was a rather quick mix, but sometimes that’s how it is, and that’s what makes creating music exciting to me, you’re never going to know (as cliche as it sounds) when creativity will strike. Okay so onto the elements of the track and what I did to get there: (I’ve attached an image of the Reason project file for some clarity- click on it to show enlarged version).
1. There are basically two synths in this song (Malstrom 2 and 3 in the photo) that do the majority of the work. The other malstroms and samplers really only add flavor to other parts, creating extra depth I suppose would be the best way to put it. Malstrom 2 is the main bass synth you hear in the intro and actually only plays one note the entire track. All the movement in the melody is just done by pitch bends at the end of each bar. I’ve increased the portamento on the synth as well to make the jump back to the root note a little more gradual, giving it a bit druggier sound I suppose, and more of a rounder feel with less definition. To achieve the tone of this synth I’ve applied a very dry reverb, and two distortion units, one that remains fairly constant and bassy and the other one which I will adjust the presence at different sections in the track to create different tones. This is why certain sections may sound like a new synth has been introduced when in fact it is just a different adjustment on the distortion unit. Malstrom 3 is the opposing sawtooth synth that does the rhythmic higher notes. This one has no distortion on it, but has unison to fill out the speaker space on the track. A more wet reverb was applied as well. This track does two parts in the song; the rhythmic intro hi notes which were just drawn in manually, and then it mimics the same melody as Malstrom 2 on the drops at 49 and 105. I like to double or triple up melodies on drops to really fill out the track at these points, but you have to be careful the synth tones aren’t too similar otherwise it’s pointless. Both these synths have been compressed to the bassdrum.
2. As for drums, I have a habit of creating a new Redrum for each drum sound I import, it’s much easier to set up effects this way rather than wiring them individually through each channel on one Redrum (although this is possible, but since Reason doesn’t really eat up too much CPU, this way is simpler and quicker). There is not too much drum work on this track- I kept it fairly basic with essentially three Redrums – one with a heavy kick, one with a classic 808 clap, and then one with a hi-hat and clap accent. The kickdrum I threw a compressor on and then EQ’d the total compression through the main mastering suite at the top of the project file. I pushed the master gain here as much as I could and then toyed with the compression knob until the bassline and the kick side-chained how I wanted it to. Other than that for drums on this track, there wasn’t too much else to it other than a crash on the pre-drop at 97 and a nice wooshy sample for both buildups which I sampled through the NN-XT. The clap programming was the bulk of the work after the EQ, just trying out a few rhythms that worked for the buildups.
3. Finally the vocal sample “This Machine Don’t Give A Shit” I had cut up into a snippet beforehand and imported into the NN-XT sampler. I ran a distortion unit on this as well to give it a grimy tone to match the bassline. All three voices of the sample are done with the same sampler just used at different notes. The nice thing about the NN-XT is it acts like a vinyl player, the higher you pitch it up, the faster the sample will play, there’s no time correction. So I took advantage of this especially on the empty space right before the drop, finding the pitch that would best space over the whole bar.
Those are the three main sections to the remix then, and I hope that my directions were clear and concise as to what I did. I was quite pleased with how this remix turned out, it felt to the point and concise, and I think reflects well to how I, as well as others, want to DJ right now. Quicker mixes- with big delivery. If any readers have any more questions I will try to respond to them in the comments section, and if there are any more ideas for things you would like to see me post about more in-depth, I’m welcome to suggestion.
