Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the company posted the stems online, and they remain in widespread circulation. (You can easily obtain them via a Google search.) This was a tremendous gift for people who teach production, songwriting and the history of music technology. It was also a gift for people whose preferred method of expressing their fandom is through remixing. I fall into both categories.
A few years ago, when I was first teaching myself controllerism, I went through the multitracks of “A Day In The Life” and sampled a bunch of loops from each stem: drums, bass, piano, guitar, orchestra, and vocals. I’m writing a book chapter right now about Ableton Live and the Push controller, so to help focus my thoughts, I figured I would load all these loops into a new session and see what I could make happen. I decided to limit myself only to material from the song, in the spirit of The Reflex. Here’s the result:
I improvised the basic structure on the Push, triggering clips without any particular plan. The next day, I had jury duty, which gave me ample time to edit and fine-tune in Arrange View.
I wanted a hip-hop feel for my remix, and the drums in “A Day In The Life” are not very useful for that purpose. Ringo mostly played fills and accents rather than a strong beat. Also, the drum sound is indistinct, and there’s a ton of bleed on the stem from the bass. So rather than try to get my samples to work, I took the clearest one, EQ’ed out as much of the bass as possible, and sliced it up into a new kit. Then I sequenced a beat on the Push. I added Beat Repeat for semi-random stutters, Drum Buss for compression and dirt, and reverb.
In jury duty, I thought the groove needed more rhythmic complexity, so I drew in a pentuplet pattern on the hi-hats (they’re highlighted below.)
I also isolated a shaker from the piano track, EQ’ed out the piano, and put heavy Beat Repeat on it so it would have an Autechre-like randomness.
For the ending, I drew an automation curve on the Tempo parameter of the master track to slow it down extremely. I also used warp markers in the piano clip to stretch the last note out as long as possible.
Obviously I do not have permission for any of this. My remix is sufficiently altered that it slipped past SoundCloud’s automated copyright detection system, but that doesn’t make it legally “okay.” Could I make a Fair Use claim? Here’s what the US Copyright Office has to say about it:
Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use.
I’m definitely doing teaching, scholarship and research, so, case closed, right?
Courts look at how the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. This does not mean, however, that all nonprofit education and noncommercial uses are fair and all commercial uses are not fair; instead, courts will balance the purpose and character of the use against the other factors below. Additionally, “transformative” uses are more likely to be considered fair. Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.
I would say my use is transformative. I used large portions of the song, but no one would confuse my track for “A Day In The Life.” I sincerely doubt I’m harming sales of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But what if every hipster academic starts remixing the Beatles? Would that cause them harm? I doubt it, but legal precedents are lacking. Judges are generally fine with people “sampling” compositions, but they tend to regard sampling of actual audio recordings as tantamount to theft.
It’s too bad the legal climate is so hostile toward critical remixing, because it’s one of the most profound creative experiences you can have. If there’s a song you’re familiar with, you can do an arrangement of it, or even transform it completely, and that will have a certain emotional effect. Long before I got involved in electronic music, I learned “A Day In The Life” on guitar, and worked up a whole solo version of it. That was fun and interesting, but it’s nothing you’d want to hear twice. There have been uncountably many covers of the song, and some of them are cool pieces of music in their own right. But without vast sonic universe of the recording, the lyrics, notes and chords lose most of their meaning.
Remixing a familiar recording is a different order of complexity from covering or arranging a song. Beyond the notes and chords and rhythms, there’s the actual sound itself, which acts on your emotions as quickly and powerfully as a touch on your hand. People can identify a beloved recording within a fraction of a second. That means that we can recognize even a very short sample used in a radically different context. The deep weirdness of hearing intimately familiar sounds arranged into novel musical structures is a sensation without precedent in all of cultural history. You get some of the same feeling from composing variations on a melody or soloing over a chord structure, but not much.
My remix has some short melodic and lyrical phrases in common with “A Day In The Life,” but the “musical” resemblance ends there. I deliberately sliced up and recombined the samples to avoid reference to the original song structure. Any given vocal is probably accompanied by piano or guitar from a different section of the song, along with a bass part from yet another section. The timbres are all familiar because they all come directly from the song, but they become strange from their new context. If I were to scramble the song this radically in a cover arrangement, it wouldn’t even meaningfully be a cover anymore, it would be a new song containing a few quotes of the Beatles.
We need the freedom to remix familiar songs. We need to be able to participate in our own musical culture, and in the United States in 2019, that culture consists almost entirely of recordings. When a recording is as familiar and iconic as “A Day In The Life,” that makes it all the more valuable as an object of critical and creative attention. Singing the song while playing guitar or piano is not an adequate way to engage its real substance. We shouldn’t wait for the courts to catch up to cultural reality. I remix the Beatles because it’s fun. But I also do it because I want to encourage other people to do it too.