I was asked to remix a track from Kurl‘s recent release Visions of an old man and decided on remixing the track Dub Trip, listen at the below Spotify link

The track is released under my more Dub Techno orientated alias TEChSLo and is featured as the second release on Organica Compila Vol 3.

It was an interesting journey, label head Pascal had initially asked for a clubby remix, which under the influence of some of my students at the time resulted in a more Tech House remix. After providing a sketch of the direction the remix was taking, Pascal kindly replied, “you’re professional as usual! So, to be honest this is not my favourite kind of music, but if this is your interpretation, it is! I would prefer something more housy and groovy….but, as I said, you are the remixer, so you can do what u want!”

Wanting to execute the brief and satisfy the label I asked for a reference track to avoid any further misunderstandings. Pascal provided some great mellow groovy house references and I used that as an opportunity to map out some of the “grooves” / quantisation patterns in the references. In particular I was trying to capture the shuffle or groove in the hats of reference tracks such as the below track.

For my students I created a Youtube video on how to map out such groove templates within Ableton, that can be found below.

The second version with a more funky groove and less hard hitting drop met with the following response from Pascal, “This is fantastic! Huge work on it! Perfect!”

In reflection I feel that I satisfied the brief, but on listening to the whole record I feel that my track could have been a bit more dubbed out and ambient. That would have fitted better with the overall sound of the compilation and also been more inline with the TEChSLo sound.

I feel that this has been a good lesson in asking for exact reference tracks and the importance of groove templates. Further, I feel it is also a good lesson in not always following the stereotype of a remix being a more banging version of the original track.

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