back to the edit

Years ago, as a teenager in the late 80s, I was mad for remixes and the like.  Those were the days of the 12″, 12″ remix, 12″ re-remix, and so on (Paul Morley, Trevor Horn and Frankie have a lot to answer for), and for some records, I’d want all of ‘em (I still have them all too, taking up an awful lot of room!).  But for a period of a few years, I did my own remixes and re-edits of favourite songs.

It was all pretty simplistic stuff, record-to-cassette (at best) or cassette-to-cassette pause-button editing together of different mixes of songs.  Later I found that my midi hifi at the time (record player plus double cassette deck and tuner) had a way of playing one cassette, playing a record at the same time and mixing the two sources together, and recording to the second cassette, which allowed me to do simple blending of two sources.

I can remember doing mixes of “Rock Me Amadeus” from (sadly departed) Falco, Whistle’s “Just Buggin’”, some hip-hop megamix stuff, some Mel and Kim mixes or edits, and who knows what else.  I’m not sure I have any of them around still.  Later still I worked on a independent music radio programme on my local station (On The Wire, still going strong, and celebrating its 25th anniversary soon), where I had access to multiple gram decks, CDs, and reel-to-reel tape machines.  Despite that, I don’t remember doing much there other than a version of The Concept’s  “Mr DJ” (a very early release on the might 4th and Broadway Island Records offshoot label), which I re-edited and overlaid samples and snippets that we used on the radio programme (and I do still have that on minidisc somewhere).

Anyway, the point of all this is twofold.  First, in my last post I mentioned the similarities between a LaRoux track and a Billie Rae Martin one.  I decided to revive my interest in editing and so forth, downloaded the latest Audacity, and tried to remember how to do all that stuff again.  The result isn’t quite finished, it needs a bit of something else (and I think I know what I will use), but suffice to say I am pleased with the result (if rather fed up of hearing both the songs).  I will post it somewhere at some point.

Secondly, today I heard a new “hot track”: “Rocket” by Sub Focus (look it up on YouTube or Juno).  And I was instantly struck by similarities with another tune from a completely different genre.  I’m not going to give the game away just yet, but it may well be the focus of my next audio editing adventure.  So don’t touch that dial.