Escape Act - God Says - A Remix for Music Technology BTEC, with notes

Hi all

This is a remix from last year as part of my course. It gained a distinction so hopefully with the few notes I put on here it might help you get the same, or you can just enjoy my version of this tune.

It's by Escape Act and called God Says. This was the first time I'd heard of either track or band. Quite like it too!

https://soundcloud.com/mr-keep-calm/escape-act-god-says-mr-keep

The first thing I did was to take the one track of drums and take a sample of them. I then double tracked them for impact but accidentally moved one. I noticed this sounded like The Stone Roses song drum intro She Bangs The Drums. So I kept it. This did leave me with an issue of getting the midi to line up as I had to pick which bit I was going to follow. I then put in the kick drum, just a logic instrument (as I don't have access to any others and was not able to make any at this stage) with a bit of tweaking on the reverb and EQ. I also put in that ping noise, an 808 drum sound.

The riff was filtered and then when the vocals start the guitar is taken out by using a little guitar stab found elsewhere in the song. The keyboard is one note using a side chain compression to pump it with the kick drum. Then at 0.57 you can hear a reversed delayed vocal. I took a vocal part, reversed it and then delayed it. Then I bounced this result and with a little trial and error got that reversed delay sound. It works pretty well here, especially with the gap in the drums. Then the baseline comes in and the chorus has the last line repeated for effect. The reverse delay is used again.

The shouts you can hear are little bits found in the background of the vocal track. They are very minor but I've amplified them as I found them quite interesting. Some say they're a bit annoying and they're probably right!

Then the song is basically finished so I use that extended "taken away" vocal along with my reversed delay sample to come into a ascending keyboard part. The shouts bring in the guitar riff again which is heavily filtered. There is a tempo increase here and this ending is designed to kinda bounce out so if an audience was listening they could start to leap around. The bass is filtered too so it comes in like a storm. There is also a very deep sub bass that seems in Logic to destroy the bass line. Not sure why and in the end it was a case of EQ and levels to get a balance between them. To end the song we just have a repeating line and shouts to build the song to an end.

Anyway, that's what I did. Hope you like it.