For this project I created a downtempo breakbeat acid remix of Kendrick Lamar’s single ‘squabble up’. I used The Prodigy – Poison, Method Man – Release Yo’ Delf (Prodigy Remix) and The Chemical Brothers – Chemical Beats as inspiration for this remix.

This is a bootleg remix that I wasn’t given stems for and had to find a way to get the isolated vocals form the orignal track to work with to create this remix. I used Serato Sample and its stem seperation tool for this, it worked really well to seperate the vocals from the original track to leave me with a vocal stem to work with. This software also indicated to me that the key of the track was Fmin, which meant I would work within this scale when composing the remix.

I created a drum track at the same tempo as the orignal (104bpm), using a combination of breakbeat samples, TR909 and TR808 drum machine sounds and other drum samples. A trick is to layer a programmed kick drum using a TR808/TR909 drum machine that lands on the same beat as the kick drum in the breakbeat sample and then side chain the breakbeats to the programmed kick so that they duck as the kick drum hits, making the kick pop out better in the mix.

When I imported the vocal stem I realised that the rhythm Kendrick raps doesn’t suit the rhythm I had with the breaks and timing was a bit off. I had to use Ableton Live’s warp function to adjust the timing of the phrasing used in his rap vocals.

I also noticed that the female vocal sample from the orginal track felt a little out of tune and was sticking out a little in the mix, I decided to use Waves Tune to correcting the pitch and tune the vocals to Fmin and after doing so noticed there were a few notes in the vocals that changed and this vocal sample sat better in the mix now.

To give the track its ‘Acid’ sound I used the Arturia TB303 software clone. Usually I would use the TD3 hardware clone for this but decided to stay in the box for this remix, mainly as a I travelling around and out of the studio at the time of this production. Whilst I prefer the feeling and workflow of working with hardware synths this 303 sofware clone did a great job of replicating the sound of the old acid box and meant I could write the automation on the synth controls and recall this easier than with hardware.

I intend to use this remix as part of the release campaign for my up coming single ‘AdrenaLINE’, which has a similar ‘Prodigy’ vibe. By having a remix of a recognisible track from a rapper that is very popluar right now (performed the Superbawl halftime show & cleaned up at The Grammys) on my social media pages during the release campaign period should draw attention to my campaign and potentail attract new fans.

I mastered the track in Pro Tools to approx -14 LUFS, for this to work best on streaming platforms. As I do not own thre copyright for this track I cannot add to monitesed platforms like Spotify. I used Soundcloud instead and have added a disclaimer in the track discription explaining that I do not own the copyright to the orginal track and that this is an unofficial ‘bootleg’ remix.