# What's the point of a remix?



## Conker (Jul 12, 2014)

So I'm a member of this Facebook group, and a bunch of people got together and said, "let's make an album based on video game remixes. Pick a song and remix it." I signed up thinking that would be fun. 

Problem is, I know nothing about remixing music. I've never done it, and I don't listen to it. 

So I'm snooping around youtube, and it seems like what I run into is people taking songs and just changing some instruments up. Sometimes they add stuff, but it's mostly in the background. Could be that I've just found some bad remixes, but I guess I don't see the point in that. It's not exactly hard to find a midi file of an old song and change all of the instruments around. 

Been using sonic music as my examples since I know that music fairly well. 


I feel like I've come off sounding really stupid here. I dunno. I'm fuckin confused.


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## Kokoro (Jul 12, 2014)

It's basically just to take an existing song and use parts of it in new and interesting ways.  The quality of a remix, I suppose, has to do with how original it sounds while maintaining distinct aspects of the source material.


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## Hewge (Jul 12, 2014)

Sounds like you've just found bad remixes. 

Although I don't know much about music, the way I'd see it is two of the same drawing, but made by two different artists. The subject matter will be the same, but the drawing themselves will be very different from one another.


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## Demensa (Jul 13, 2014)

Eh, I'm not really into remixes, but the point is to take the original and make it your own.  
What 'making it your own' entails is kind of vague... you could add some new basslines and drums to turn it into a 'dance' song.
You could take vocal tracks from a song and transplant them into a new one. 
You could chop up all of the samples and mess around with them before putting them together in a new song.
The resulting product could be very similar to the original or sound nothing like it, but you _are_ supposed to use material from the original recording to count technically as a remix (As opposed to a cover, where you take some of the musical elements, but not from the actual recording.) 
Also, the boundary between 'remix' and simply using samples in an original song can sometimes be blurry. Same goes between 'remix' and 'cover'...


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## Conker (Jul 13, 2014)

Yeah. I'm trying to chop this up and put it back together, though I'm now having the problem of "this sounds kind of shitty" Which maybe isn't surprising since I've never done this before, but I'm growing discouraged despite the time I've put into it. I've got like a minute of music that normally loops, and I need to make it like two or three minutes long? I dunno.


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## Python Blue (Jul 13, 2014)

I don't understand remixes, either, which is why I seldom do them. It's good promotional material if one of the artists isn't as well known as the other, but in terms of idea and composition, I can't think of much that's original about them.

Add to the problem that many remixes do not have the original creator's explicit permission when it comes to any stems used, making those tracks technically illegal. Whether such a remixer gets caught and sued is a different story, though there's always the chance of that happening. This point goes hand in hand with what Demensa said about using samples.


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