One of the most significant developments in the past fifty years of popular music is the idea of using existing recordings as raw material for new musical expression. The remix began as a way to make dance versions of pop songs, but it has evolved into an entire new art medium unto itself.
First of all, what even is a remix
It turns out to be difficult to define the remix precisely. Let’s start with an example. Here’s “The Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel.
Here’s a remix by The Golden Pony.
The remix takes the original audio and transforms it through editing, effects, and addition of new musical material (beats, synths, and so on.) It’s interesting, though, that the original song is itself a remix. Simon and Garfunkel originally recorded it with acoustic guitar. Once the song started to get airplay, producer Tom Wilson overdubbed electric guitar and drums and re-released it. Simon and Garfunkel didn’t find out about the remix until they heard it on the radio. So really, the Golden Pony version is a remix of a remix.
Remix precursors
There are some past musical practices that, in retrospect, function like remixes: variations, jazz arrangements, and quotation and interpolation of all kinds. For example, you could consider Franz Liszt’s piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s Symphonies to be analog remixes.
Other analog “remixes” include Bach’s Musical Offering, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the Ellington Nutcracker, and John Coltrane’s arrangement of “My Favorite Things.”
To really be a remix, though, a piece of music can’t just rework existing ideas; it needs to involve existing audio recordings. Modernist composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen began to create music by manipulating existing recordings in the 1940s and 1950s. For example, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece “Gesang der Jünglinge” (Song of the Youth) is a tape of a boy soprano that Stockhausen sped up, slowed down, cut and spliced back together, and combined with electronically generated noises.
You can also see the beginnings of the remix in the practice of editing live recordings in the studio. Miles Davis was particularly interested in the possibilities of studio editing. For example, in 1969, he recorded Joe Zawinul’s tune “Shhh/Peaceful.”
Then Miles and his producer Teo Macero cut out all the composed parts, and edited together different takes of the solo sections to make an endless single-chord groove. This is the version that was released on the album In A Silent Way. Poor Joe Zawinul was very disappointed that they cut out his entire composition, but Miles made the right choice; In A Silent Way is a legendary album.
Yusef Lateef did a different kind of jazz “remix” by taking a 1930s record of “In a Little Spanish Town” and recording a saxophone solo over it.
So what is a remix?
In the 1970s, remixes became important for dance music, and since then, they have been a cornerstone of global popular culture. However, it’s still unclear what the word “remix” means exactly. Let’s start with the Wikipedia definition:
A remix is a piece of media which has been altered from its original state by adding, removing and changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, books, video, or photograph can all be remixes. The only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new.
Why do people make remixes? The traditional reasons include:
- Adapting a track for a new setting, for example, by remaking a radio song for the club or vice versa.
- Adapting a track for different audiences, for example, by making a house remix of a rap song.
- Altering a song for artistic purposes, for example, as a way to comment on a well-known piece of music, as the Golden Pony did with “The Sound of Silence”.
Wikipedia contrasts remixes with re-edits, remasters, and mixes. Let’s take these terms one at a time.
- Re-edits are new versions of songs that alter the sound or structure without using any new material that wasn’t already present in the original recording. My favorite examples are the Reflex Re-edits, in which a DJ named Nicolas Laugier remakes iconic songs by editing their multitrack stems, without bringing in any additional sounds. Some of Laugier’s edits keep the songs mostly intact, but make them more DJ-friendly by quantizing the tempo and adding longer intros and endings. Others are dramatic re-imaginings. While an expert listener might care about the difference between a remix and a re-edit, in practice, the terms get used interchangeably. Certainly, a casual listener would hear Laugier’s tracks as “remixes.”
- Next, there’s the remaster, in which you take an existing recording and create a new master version without altering its musical content at all. You might use compression, EQ, noise reduction and various restoration tools to brighten up or clarify an old recording, especially if it’s being released in a new format. You might even do a new mix of the multitracks, which is technically remixing. However, in a remaster, you’re not trying to make a new piece of music; you’re just trying to improve the experience of listening to an old one. Few people outside the audio engineering field even know what mastering is, much less remastering, so there isn’t as much confusion between this practice and remixing.
- Finally, there’s just plain mixing, where you set the volume levels of sounds in a multitrack recording, and apply effects like compression, reverb, EQ, and so on. Mixing is a step in the completion of an unfinished recording, whereas remixing is an alteration of a finished recording. In practice, however, the line between mixing and remixing is blurry. For example, you might mix something yourself, before deciding to hire a professional to complete the job. Or you might make substantial changes to the musical content of a song during the mixing stage, as Brian Eno likes to do. In digital studio practice, the techniques of mixing and remixing are identical, and the only thing that separates them is that you might consider one version of the track to be the official/canonical one, whereas other versions are the “remixes.”
Reggae versioning
Remixing in the dance music sense originated in Jamaican dancehall music of the 1960s and 1970s. Producers and engineers like Ruddy Redwood, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry created instrumental mixes (which they called “versions”) of reggae tunes. At first, they simply removed the vocal tracks, but then they began doing more sophisticated manipulations. For example, they muted and unmuted different instruments in different sections, repeated parts, and added reverb and tape echo.
Here’s a reggae instrumental by Ansel Williams called “Stalag 17.”
This track was versioned (remixed) by Winston Riley to make the backing instrumental for Sister Nancy’s reggae classic “Bam Bam.” Riley played the multitrack tape of “Stalag 17” and created a new instrumental by muting and unmuting tracks, by changing their levels, and by adding echo.
Sister Nancy’s vocal is also a kind of remix, since her chorus quotes the chorus of an older song by the same name. Like many classic reggae songs, the authorship of “Bam Bam” is fascinatingly complex. Also, “Bam Bam” has itself been sampled, quoted and remixed many times.
Disco
In the mid-1970s, DJs in American and European discos began to remix pop songs to make them better suited to the dance floor. They knew that club audiences prefer songs to be longer, more repetitive, and more percussion-heavy than radio listeners do. So DJs began to make their own versions of songs, using loops, tape edits, and drum machines. Eventually, record labels began hiring DJs to make official dance mixes of their releases. Walter Gibbons produced the first commercial 12-inch dance mix, a re-edit of “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure. Here’s the three-minute version of the song that played on the radio:
And here’s Walter Gibbons’ remix, which is more than three times longer.
As you can hear, the “remix” is not just about the mix (the balance of the different sounds), it’s also about editing and duplicating audio to substantially change the musical structure.
Disco DJs began producing their own original songs as well, fusing songwriting, recording, production and remixing into a single process. This process is how most original pop songs are created today. The line between remixing and songwriting has only been getting blurrier over time.
Hip-hop
In the Bronx, Jamaican immigrants met local African-American and Latinx DJs, and they combined ideas from reggae and disco remix cultures. The result was the beginning of hip-hop. DJs like Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc experimented with doing their remixes live, in real time. They played two copies of the same record on two turntables so they could cut back and forth between them, looping them on the fly.
DJs noticed that the crowds at their parties got especially hyped up during drum breaks, so they used their looping technique to make these drum breaks longer. For example, they saw how dancers liked the drum solo sections of “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band better than the actual song, so they just looped those parts for long periods of time.
DJs also tried scratching records, manually turning the record under the needle. Here is Grandmaster Flash doing a live, real-time mix by scratching and mixing on multiple records. This is extraordinarily difficult to do with vinyl!
The first widely heard commercial recording to use turntable scratching was Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” with scratching by Grand Mixer D.ST.
Megamixes
As the name implies, a megamix is a supersized remix, combining many songs together into a single seamless whole. Iconic examples include mixes by Double Dee and Steinski and the Latin Rascals.
These mixes were heroically labor-intensive undertakings using analog tape; Ableton Live has made them easier to create. The megamix is a great way to showcase musicological connections, as Wayne Marshall proved by seamlessly stitching together a hundred years of the “American clave” rhythm.
Remixes in current pop and dance music
Remixes are crucial to the present-day pop music industry. Most mainstream hits become popular in the clubs first. DJs will hear a song and like it, and start playing it during sets. If the dancers respond well to it, then DJs play it more often. Cool and influential people will hear the song and play it for their less cool friends. Eventually, the song’s popularity takes on its own momentum. There are other ways to have a song break out – YouTube, SoundCloud, TikTok, traditional advertising – but clubs continue to be a crucial pathway. This is why every major pop release comes accompanied by a series of official remixes: one for black clubs, one for gay clubs, and so on.
Artists and labels also tolerate or actively encourage unofficial remixes, because that is an effective form of free marketing. Björk used to host a web site with hundreds of fan remixes of her songs. (People still make fan remixes of her music, but now they post them to SoundCloud and YouTube.) Björk even released an entire album of fan remixes of her song “Army of Me” to raise money for charity.
I find it most impressive when a remixer transforms a bad or silly song into a great one. For example, when I was a kid, I enjoyed “Copacabana” by Barry Manilow.
When I got older and heard some actual Latin music and funk, I found Barry Manilow’s watered-down version of those styles to be embarrassingly uncool. Recently, though, I heard a re-edit of “Copacabana” by The Reflex. He removed most of the lyrics, and just kept the percussion breakdowns. In other words, he identified the parts that made me love the song as a kid, and he removed all the goofy and awkward parts. The result is one of the best pieces of dance music I’ve heard in a long time.
The remix is a culturally significant idea outside of dance and pop music. Glenn Gould thought that recorded music should be interactive, and that people should be free to remix classical recordings to suit their own preferences. Remixing can also be political, a way to comment on music using music itself. I made a rap remix of Ben Shapiro explaining his asinine theory that rap is not music. And remixing has untapped potential for the teaching and learning of non-electronic musics. Specifically, remixes can be a scaffold for writing original music. Begin with an existing song and start replacing parts of it with your own ideas. Replace enough of them, and you are left with a new song. Will Kuhn and I explore this idea in depth in our book, and we give specific project plans around it as well.
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