1. “Go Back” (4:59)
2. This is effectively a remix/mashup of the song “Loosen Your Hold” by South. All of the sample source material can be found in the first 40 or so seconds of the song before the first chorus (and more importantly, the drums and bass) come in. I sampled each individual chord played by the harpsichord and rearranged them into two different chord progressions by assigning them to keyboard keys and playing them into live. A similar processes was used for all the sample work. I had to filter the vocal samples a bit, cutting off alot of the lower end and some high end so that they would fit into the chord progression better, since they were ripped directly from the song and weren’t a capella. There is a heavier filter for the first half of the song, cutting more lows to give the “crappy small speaker” effect. The banjo/acoustic guitar samples additionally compressed and EQ’d to deal with some muddiness and to keep Glitch from peaking, which it sometimes does.
The drums are Reason’s Hip-Hop Kit 5 preset in ReDrum triggered from Live and being sent to a beat-repeat with moderate randomness, allowing for triplets and 16th notes. All the drums were run through Live’s Saturator plugin and the kick was separated into its own channel for extra EQ to add boominess and to drive it like crazy with its own Saturator.
The bass was Reason’s Subtrator Hyperbottom preset, slightly modified. I’d tell you how I modified it, but I don’t remember. Again, triggered from Live, then Saturator’d, sidechain compressed to the kick drum, and EQ’d. The slides are done by automating Reason’s pitchbend from Live, starting at the normal tone and going down an octave as the note holds out.
The piano was just the Grand Piano A setting on Reason’s NN-XT Sampler, played in from from my keyboard and then corrected in Live. I put it in because I noticed one of the harpsichord samples had a single piano note in it (you can hear it at about 5 seconds into the piece, and then ever time I use that sample after that) and it stuck to me enough to try to use it. This sample set sounded the closest to that piano sound.
Most of this was then sent to one of two reverb units, either a drum room or a vocal plate.
The piece makes very liberal use of the DBlue Glitch plugin from Illformed.org, as can be heard on the chopped up banjo in the build and end sections and on the vocals right after the clean verse in the middle section of the song. I set it to 8th notes and allowed the randomness to do the rest, only changing something when I didn’t like the way it sounded.
3. I talked about my samples in the last section, so I’ll just focus on originality. On the originality scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest, I’d probably give myself a 2. Everything I did in this piece has been done before, and I’m pretty certain has been done better. This was mostly an excersize to figure out how it was done and what kind of results I could get with limited time and resources. I took alot of inspiration for both the idea and the production from Amplive’s RainyDayz Remixes (remixes of Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”; they’re free to download and quite good, I highly recommend giving a listen) in which he similarly mashes up songs with themselves for a new product. I liked the concept of using a very soft and pretty rock song to create a bumpin’ hip-hop track that could still create that floaty, dreamy feel of the original song.
4. 
1 – Session view of the intro/build section. You can see the rhythmic pattern of the harpsichord, banjo, and vocal samples.
2 – Session view of the rest of the song and most of the Glitch settings I used for the vocals.
3 – Clip view, my Reason rack, and the Saturator settings on the kick drum. Notice the completely insane amount of drive.
4 – Midi automation on the bass track for the slides. This is the bass pattern for the middle part of the song.
5. Go Back.mp3 Loosen Your Hold.mp3
If anyone wants an uncompressed copy or something, let me know I’ll upload that too.
