Get Off My Lawn!

NOTE: I wrote this bit for my column in Computer Music, but I just couldn’t make my point in the space they allot me, and I didn’t want to toss it, so I decided to put it up here for discussion instead.

I was trying like hell to come up with a better lead-in for this column than the incredibly prosaic “you kids today, you just don’t know how easy you have it” but nothing’s working, so I’ll just out with it.

The “easy” I’m referring to is the re-mix, and its retarded foster child, the mash-up. Prior to the advent of the modern DAW, doing a remix was a big, big deal. A step-by-step process of a typical remix:

1. Book time in a studio that has two 24-track machines so you can make a copy of your 2” tape. Keep in mind that a roll of tape cost around a hundred dollars. If the song was recorded on an SSL board, you also needed to make copies of the 8” floppies for the recall and automation. Make a photocopy of the track sheet and throw that in there. Wrap the whole thing in several layers of tin foil and Fed-Ex it to the remixer.

2. The remixer then needs to book time in a studio. The first hour or so is spent biasing the deck to the tape. The next couple hours are spent making a facsimile of the original mix, and figuring out what the hell is on each track. (Since you only had 23 tracks to work with, it wasn’t uncommon to have a couple different parts on any given track. The main instruments would have their own, but all the extra stuff would be somewhat jumbled.)

3. Now the real fun begins. Chances are just about 100% that whatever sequencer you’re using isn’t going to chase the SMPTE on the tape, because SMPTE and the chasing thereof was a very fickle thing. There were numerous tricks and tools to deal with this one particular aspect, and all of them would be applied. Eventually, usually, you’d get it working, and your sequencer (which was almost always either an Atari ST or a hardware unit) would be chasing the SMPTE and more or less in time.

(At this point you’ve burned at a bare minimum four hours of studio time, for a few hundred dollars.)

4. We’ll leave out the middle part where the remixer does Things to make it a remix. Usually, it would be just that, a re-mix. If it was a “dance” mix, the drums would probably be replaced with other drums, but generally the main parts of the song would be left alone. Maybe some various other things would be added, but generally, you worked with what was already on the tape, and maybe just added a couple little things here and there.

5. You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about tempo or pitch. On a tape, the two are immutably tied. You couldn’t change one without changing the other. Time stretching, when it came around, was such an incredibly tedious process that it wasn’t often used except to get a loop to sit in with a song.

6. So, the remixer, in the interests of saving money (the more he spent on the studio time, the less he got to take home) would come in to the process with a fairly good idea of what he was going to do. If this involved lengthening the song, or changing the arrangement in any way, the process got truly silly. The method here would be to run the individual sections on to a master 1/2” (or 1/4” occasionally) tape, and get out the splicing block and razor blade. The word “edit” is not ill applied here.

7. Once all these pieces were assembled, if it was post-91 or so, the 1/2” master would then be run to a DAT and sent to the label. The label would then play it for the original artist, who (usually) got to approve or disapprove it. If the latter, it was generally shelved, as there was too much money involved to actually do all that over.

And my point in all of this? It’s thus: you kids today. You just don’t know how easy you have it. The only thing better about the pre-DAW era is that mash-ups were completely impossible to make, so we never had to find out what the vocals of “Closer” sounded like over the music of “In Da Club.” The world was a better place.