What musicianship skills do you find yourself using in order to make remixes?

[mickomoo]

Yeah that's kinda a muddled title, but it's the best I can think of...

For those of you who write remixes, do you find that you really need to have a solid background in music and theory? Also when remixing do you follow the notes in the songs by ear, or do you try and find sheet music for the songs you're playing/remaking?

I started writing my own music and I found that that's much easier than remixing for some reason. I'm figuring it's because I'm not completely adept at music theory, I mean I have a small background but nothing to brag about. I was just wondering what skills others find necessary to utilize when remixing.

[Gario]

A variation of the 'How do I remix' question... but hell, I'll help, anyway.

Musicianship skills that are required:

Dictation - The ability to hear music and replicate it via score or through another medium. You cannot possibly remix without this skill. It's an easy skill to practice, fortunately. Even better, a good way to practice is to listen to VG music and recreate them on your instrument... sweet.

Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) - While making music doesn't require this, if you want to clean up your work (or even write it from scratch) and share it with people on the internet it's mandatory. Competency with a DAW is mandatory.

Proficiency in an instrument - For the sake of this topic, a sequencer will be considered an instrument. You can have the greatest ear for music & remixes in the world, but without any instrumental competency you have no outlet.

Musicianship skills that are recommended:

Recording - While the ability to use a good DAW can make up for this, sometimes, and the ability to use a sequencer can make this less important, it's certainly a good thing to know how to do well (and have the equipment to do effectively). It's pretty tough to deal with poorly recorded samples, making for much more work than is worth most of the time, for a remixer.

Form - People guess their way through remixes often enough to where it's possible to make music without this skill, but it's generally obvious when a person does this (and not in a good way, either). Having some skill in shaping the overall structure of the track makes remixing much, much easier. I highly recommend learning about form and applying it.

Basic Interval/Chord/Scale/Harmonic Theory - While not necessary by any means, it's nice to be able to communicate with other people about the music. Theory does close to nothing while composing, believe it or not, but it DOES allow you to explain a problem/understand an explanation of a problem with far greater ease. For example, instead of fumbling with words, like 'That thing you did at about 1:29, with the notes moving pretty quickly to make up the harmony', you can simply say 'The arpeggio'. It's quite nifty.

Sight Singing - You don't need to be able to sing lines you've written in order to remix. It speeds up the process immensely, though, by allowing you to skip the step of playing back the project to 'hear how it sounds'. The less time you spend listening to your track the more time you can spend writing it. Singing the lines to yourself while writing them (or knowing what you're going to play before playing it) saves more time than you can imagine, when remixing.

Musicianship skills that are nice, but specialized:

Counterpoint - It's a great tool to use when trying to compose independent lines against a precomposed melody, and remixing provides this opportunity all the time. It's also an excellent tool for creating flowing harmonic motion rather than blocky, clunky harmonies. It's a tool that doesn't need to be applied to everything, but it's nice to have an understanding of it.

Pantonal/Modern Dictation - Most songs you'll deal with are not atonal, so this is a specialized tool that won't be used often. However, when you do come across a song you like that doesn't follow any conventional harmonic structural theory you'll be glad to have this skill under your belt, since without it these songs are completely inaccessible to the normal remixer. It also give you an alternative way of listening to conventional songs, possibly providing alternative interpretations to normal tracks when listening to them. Like I mentioned before, though, this is a skill that rarely needs to be employed.

Proficiency with Multiple Instruments - It's pretty obvious that the more instruments you can play, the better. It's not as important as you'd think, though, since it's not hard to find willing musicians, either. The convenience is excellent to have, though, so the more the better, in my opinion.

Here's hoping that helps a little bit.

[Rozovian]

What most ppl call theory is just a formal way of explaining what sounds good and explaining music. What you need is the ears to tell what makes stuff sound good - that's ultimately the most useful skill. Second most useful skill is actually being able to make good sounding stuff (but if you only have the first skill and not the second you'll at least not do really bad ones ).

Gario covered this quite well already, or at least one aspect of it, so I'll cover something else. I find that the ability to critique your own works is among the most useful skills to have, the ability to figure out what exactly is wrong with it and how to fix it. Listen to bad music and comparing it to good music is one way to learn this, listening to works in progress, is another way of learning it.

Our feedback boards are a great place to practice putting the stuff you hear are a bit off or flat out wrong into words, which will help you explain it to yourself as well as to others... and it'll help you understand feedback from others when they say something like "too muddy", "needs more mids", "I hear the compressor", "bad transitions" or whatever.

Just know that it takes about two years to get to ocr-postable level if you don't have much music skills/proficiency/knowledge/practice from before. You can speed it up by trying hard but that might take the fun out of it. That's an ability too, btw - to have fun while making music. And it might just be the utmost important one.

[zircon]

In terms of skills unrelated to music technology, I find myself relying most on my solid knowledge of how to play the piano as well as the fundamentals of music theory (eg. about a year or so worth of college courses on the topic.) Ear training and dictation is also fairly important - I did a year of that as well. When I'm making remixes, 9 times out of 10 I don't need a MIDI or any sheet music. Sometimes I need a MIDI if the chords or sequences are incredibly fast and/or complicated, and too hard for me to make out, though that hasn't happened lately.

[LuketheXjesse]

My years of playing guitar sort of naturally taught my ears how to replicate notes on anything I need to. Learning lots of Video Game Music on guitar helped too.

I don't have a whole lot of theory knowledge outside of Time Signatures and scales and whatnot, which is something I've been meaning to work on.

[SnappleMan]

I pretend I'm masturbating. This makes me completely comfortable and relaxed so I can rock out naturally. Of course this is done in the nude, and I actually masturbate.

[Legion303]

What zircon and snapple said, and also you'll learn a lot more about song construction if you break down the parts by ear. You can check sheet music afterward if you want to check accuracy.

-steve

[Yoozer]

rock out naturally

So, all your guitars have this color.

Most important to me is the ability to play and to know theory; master your instrument so you don't need to think when playing. All the rest is secondary to that, because it's something you have to do yourself; all the rest can be outsourced if necessary.