Bridging the divide: “DJ or Producer”?

Step 1: Song Selection

There are many approaches to finding the proper material to play with an instrumentalist. For starters, choose around 15 songs for your subject to play along with. You should try for a variety of genres just in case. Keep in mind the emotion the instrument portrays: the chinese violin ‘erhu’ is great for sad songs but pairs well with dubstep, classical guitar is great for chilled out scenes but can also work with latin hip hop, and so forth.

• If your instrument is polyphonic (can play 2 or more notes at once) try to find a song with little to no backing chords. Minimal Techno is great for this since it relies on a single note. Adam Beyer – London comes to mind; there’s a lot of room to pair Aminor & Amajor with Dminor & Dmajor, and so forth.
• If your instrument is monophonic (one note at a time, like a flute), look for a song without a prevalent main melody (Chilly Gonzales – Knight Moves is an excellent pair with a trumpet).

Step 2: Check the frequencies

Keep your frequencies in mind so the instrument’s sound doesn’t clash (Refer to the reference tracks post and apply the principle to samples of the track and the prefab instrument if you have it). Get feedback from your talent- nobody wants to play a song they don’t like. You’ll be left with around 5 songs if you’re lucky.

What’s with the cheap trumpets? 2:49 begs for a huge solo, and some backing grunge guitar. Do it!

Step 3: Remixing

Cut up the songs…

• Import the song into your favourite DAW
• Look for stripped-down parts of the song where you’re able to isolate 1 or 2 sounds
• Find the intro, 1st breakdown, 1st verse, bridge, chorus, and 2nd breakdown; the meat and potatoes, so to speak.
• Use your stripped-down samples to recreate the basis of the meat and potatoes. You’re going to be layering your live instrument on top of these parts to recreate the songs.
• Arrange the recreations into a generic song form [Intro, Breakdown, 1st Verse, Bridge, Chorus, 2nd Verse, Bridge, Chorus/Outro] as a bed track. You can play with these later, but take baby steps for now. Export it and send it to the talent.
• Use a midi keyboard with a prefab of the select instrument to experiment with some sounds. Keep that original bed track open for the talent, but feel free to record over as a starting point. Remember, let your instrumentalist have some room to experiment when he/she comes in.
• If your frequencies clash, you can always sidechain a compressor to pull out a certain level of frequencies of the original export when your talent is playing.

Find some cool effects you can use with the keyboard&prefab combination. A loopstation will usually come in handy, but if you have a variety of effects you might as well try them out to see which ones work. Important Note: VSTs eat up CPU (computer processing) power so there will be a significant time gap between the live instrument and what your soundcard spits out. This is why people use analog sound processing hardware; it alleviates the computer from doing the work so you can get better sample rates and faster processing times.

Step 4: Live Mixing and Performing

Ask your live talent to come in; bring out your microphone and start recording. Record everything and keep it organized according to the segments of your songs. You’ll need these to experiment with later on. But for now, see how your talent likes the effects they’re working with. Try to mimic some melodies or chords of known songs if you’d like to make a mashup. If it works, great. Either way let your ears make the choice in the end. Send the talent home and get to work with the samples you’ve got.  Keep in mind you’re going to be tweaking and routing the sound when you perform live. There’s no way your talent will play exactly on time so automations are useless. Set up your audio patches so you can work with them quickly.

Step 5: Rearranging & Mastering

• Lay your track down and export the bed track + cut samples without any fx in your DAW. Export it.
• Run through your fx and perform, live, using the cut samples in place of the instrumentalist tweak your EQs so the final raw samples sit well with the FX and in the total mix. Export it.
• Send these two tracks to the musician, and tell him/her to learn the first song (the one without the fx).

Step 6: Practice, Practice, Practice

Bring the talent in and perform the piece live. Try to mix from a similar song into one you just made, then out into another. Remember the cue points for your talent and always be on par with counting measures and bars. You are the conductor so make sure your talent comes in at the right time.

Perform the piece live.

Perform the piece live until you’re sick of it. Remember, your job is to perform it perfectly. There’s no room for mistakes in front of 1000 eager people.