The process of building and finishing a tune has been described in various ways. Taken the huge amount of tracks produced and the relatively small number of actual releases, every producer has a certain release ratio, that is the quotient from the former two entities. While there are some peeps who probably get pretty close to 100% (think top dawgs), most of us certainly fall below that line.
The topic covered by this post though is not the labels’ release strategy or an discussion on quality. Instead, I’ll focus on the question of what to do with the unused output. There are two issues to address: Firstly, the evolution of tracks labelled “done” and secondly the further activities towards an audience/release.
Let us for now assume you’ve finished a track and are highly confident with it. You’ve A/B-compared it with some reference tunes, passed to others, and there are some buddy DJs who play it out a couple of times. Nevertheless, all efforts to get a release have failed, and the play times stall in small figures. Finally, you realize you haven’t managed to advance the track to anywhom beyond the circle of friends. Typically, you will probably continue to mention the track, but will focus on other things soon and thereby effectively bury the tune.
Yes, there are times when a track is mostly crap. It has very limited potential only – still you’ve put effort into building it up. The question now is: Which additional effort and which methodology does it take to enhance the given track, so it has a brighter future in the terms stated above? The solution my be to restructure/-arrange it from the ground up – aka remix yourself. From my perspective there seem to be at least two ways to achieve this, do it yourself or have someone remix your track instead.
The tipping point in that restructuring approach is the firm will to deeply change the track’s interior:
- Completely replace the drums, the bassline or the overall mood
- Change the basic character from smooth to aggressive or vice versa
- Create something weird worth listening to, like putting a glitch effect on a prominent instrument – play around freely
- Destroy the structure, rearrange it in a completely new way, thereby focussing on the arrangement instead of the single loopy elements within
- Throw away most of it, focus on only 1-2 elements, like a theme or kick and snare sound
- You may also consider converting the tune to a completely different genre
- Mix two or more tunes from that pool of semi-dead tracks
I’ve had good experience with this approach. There is quite a couple of tracks by myself alone or in cooperation with Nphect which didn’t seem to properly flash us, so we decided to try something new on top of what was already done. One example is Rotor, which used to have a prominent vocoder voice element and techno bleeps on top. We just reduced everything to the core and focussed on that midrangy trademark sound. In a similar vein, White Russian used to have a quite different structure, which we broke up, played around with and re-put into final place.
Often people are just bored and are looking for something special. The higher the risk you take, the higher the probability of someone out there to like it.
Technorati Tags: track, restructure
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