Ever wondered what goes into making a remix of a hit song? From liaising with music labels to spending hours in the studio refining a sound, there's more to remixing that meets the eye. In the lead up to his Defected Malta set, we caught up with DJ/producer and long-time friend of Defected and Glitterbox Dave Lee to get the low-down on his favourite remixes of all time.
Here's a breakdown of how his most notable remixes came to be...
Masters At Work - Backfired
'As a remixer your job is always made much easier when working with a really strong song and vocal. MAW contacted me to do this because they liked my mix of Erro ‘Don’t Change.’ ‘Backfired' has lots of great elements so in theory it should’ve been a fairly straight forward one to do but I do recall when I was in the middle of it and we had put down the new keys and bass a DJ mate called me up and asked what I was working on, so I told him it was a new MAW single featuring India. He got very excited, and I had to admit at that point it sounded a complete mess with far too much going on. Sometimes remixes and productions go through stages where the parts just aren’t gelling. It might be a question of tightening up timing, rebalancing, or getting rid of elements entirely (even if you like them). It’s rarely plane sailing all the way through.'
Earth Wind & Fire - Can’t Let Go
'Though it was a late single from the ‘I Am’ album, ‘Can’t Let Go’ wasn’t one of Earth Wind & Fire’s big radio led hits, but that meant I never got tired of hearing it endlessly. Built around a very distinctive gospel style piano riff it was always a song I dreamt of remixing. I eventually managed to get hold of the multi from Sony about 10 years ago, but it was a bugger to remix. For a start when you hear it isolated the piano is very busy which scuppered some of the arrangement ideas I had. I tried replaying it, but the sound just didn’t quite gel sonically.'
'I regularly returned to it every couple of months to see if anything jumped out as wrong sonically or arrangement wise, normally I’d make a few tweaks, but I was starting to think maybe it was a remix that wouldn’t make the final cut. I decided to get a friend’s opinions on it and before sending it over I tweaked it a little more and somehow this time I made some meaningful progress. Over the course of the following few days, three years after I had started it, I had some breakthroughs. I started with removing the middle eight (which I liked but was making it feel a little disjointed), then using the verse music later in the song as an instrumental break made the remix go somewhere interesting – I ended up using it in the intro too. Somehow changing one element led to another idea and another until it finally all fell into place, like a particularly difficult puzzle.'
Simphonia 'Can’t Get Over Your Love'
'Simphonia is Paul Simpson aka Serious Intention, he had a few other proto-house aliases. Paul released three songs under this moniker on Atlantic and Easy Street, all featuring the lovely sultry voice of his then partner Carmen Brown. He brought this to me at the Republic office in 1989 and we signed the release on the label. Though I really liked it I was a little disappointed with its performance in terms of sales. A year or so later we put out a retrospective best of Republic called ‘Rewind’ featuring reworks of some of our catalogue by the likes of A Guy Called Gerald, Derrick May and Andrew Komix. At the time I had been making house music for two/three years and had a couple of remixes at that point so I to attempt one for ‘Can’t Get Over Your Love’. I had sampled the ‘Love Thang’ disco drum loop a few months before but never finished the track, I thought it sounded really good and hadn’t ever heard it used before in house. That loop was the basis of the beat, even though it’s a bit flammy with the kick it gives the song an authentic disco drum sound. Musically everything is different from the original apart from the vibes solo - the idea was to reflect the Salsoul references in the lyrics with the new keys. Unlike remixes I do now which I work on over weeks and months in dribs and drabs, ‘Can’t Get Over Your Love’ was completed in one long 24 hour session and involved several different musicians coming in to contribute. When I got home after the marathon session I wasn’t tired at all, I was still buzzing as it was the first time I felt sure that the end result was a good remix, something I would actually buy for myself.'
Christopher Cross - Ride Like The Wind
'I always loved ‘Ride Like The Wind’ - I bought a copy of the 7” in 1980. Surprisingly, although it received plenty of Radio 1 support and reached number 1 in the USA, it stalled outside the all-important UK Top 40. Many people in the UK know the song via the Italian house version by East Side Beat. Fast forward 30 years and I was trying my hardest to get inside the major labels tape archives to remix some of their back catalogue. This involved an enormous amount of emails and phone calls! Although it was something that most people within the labels thought could work, it just hadn’t really been done before, meaning there was no protocol for such requests and a lot of red tape to cut through. Thankfully my perseverance eventually paid off and for a couple of years I was able to acquire the tapes (usually paying the transfer costs) and then once the remixes were approved internally (another massive hurdle) release the remixes on my ‘Remixed With Love’ compilations. Getting the parts and then clearing the rights to release the result is a massive component of this type of remix.'
'The amazing live string arrangement along with the energetic congas and driving riff the song is based around (complete with some lovely embellishments from the pianist) meant there was plenty of elements to create the extended dance mix ‘Ride the Wind’ never had. I have to say after working on it for months the session had become very processor intensive, so slow and cumbersome to work on. I had pretty much done the new mix, kept the original drums but cut them up and it sounded good, but the arrangement wasn’t quite right. At this stage I sometimes bounce the mix down to stems with EQ and FX, it means I’ve got a much simpler session to work on, so I can approach it with a new perspective and easily/quickly experiment with drastic changes. I recall it was on a flight back from a gig in France I worked on the stems on my laptop and reshaped it into the version that was on the release.'
'When I’m doing a remix the intro is very important, it’s hard to get the rest of it right when the intro isn’t quite happening. Once I got the big dramatic string part over the drums at the start then the rest fell into place. The other big difference with my mix is the outro which makes a lot more of the chorus section - many people’s favourite part of the song. I added a synth solo but wasn’t sure whether it was better or worse with it, so left it in for the digital download but not the vinyl and CD.'
The Vision - Mountains
'When I get asked to remix a brand-new song the reality is I don’t want to totally love the original. If I like everything about it already then what’s my angle on the remix? In some respects, the best songs to remix are ones where the vocal and melody are great but the backing track is completely different to your own musical style. When Simon Dunmore sent me the Vision ‘Mountains’ as a potential remix I did like the original and thought it might be a hard one to better. As I often do these days, I asked Simon to send me the acapella and let me try a couple of things before committing to it. I had Michele Chiavarini in the studio the following week and he is one of the best players for coming up with interesting chords for remixes that work really well with vocals - that’s not easy. I’ve spent many remix sessions trying loads of options, none of which were quite right. However, on this occasion Michele came up with a really nice progression for the chorus. I remember after he put the chords in the loop around the chorus, we were both thinking ‘it’s a shame this wasn’t our own original song rather than a remix’.
'Sometimes people can be precious about giving away their best ideas on remixes, but if you’re taking on a remix then you need to be prepared give it 100%. If you don’t want to do that then in my opinion you shouldn’t be remixing. I thought it would be a nice idea to reference my old Reese Project remix in the intro. This was right before we went into the first lockdown, normally I like to be present all the recording but I had to do the guitar and live percussion remotely - luckily with people I had previously worked with so it wasn’t such a bad thing!
'Usually I road test my mixes a few times at gigs before delivering them to the label but this time it wasn’t possible. Once I’d submitted the mix and managed to play it out I realised the kick was too long and boomy - something that wasn’t apparent on my studio speakers. So I ended up changing it at the last minute a week or so before release. Some people tend to get something finished and that’s it, but I’m a tinkerer who keeps refining the sound and arrangement, sometimes it can be pointless and on other occasions it makes quite a big difference.'