the baby needs hardware project

notes & reason tips

• i say ten minutes, because (once you've got the hang of this method) if it's not working out pretty quickly, then chances are that it's not going to work out - so best bet is to scrap it & start again.
• for choice of song, what seems to work best are songs that are musically well written & interesting, but performed/produced in a crapppy way - this gives you a decent tune to work with, without the schackles of the orginal sound.
  (or, if you're like me, choose songs that lot's of other people like, and then screw them up completely)
  also - there'll be no vocals (obviously), but you may get a vocal melody line in the midi file which will make up for this - sometimes though, you won't get one and if the chosen song is vocal driven it wont work quite so well.
• for selecting instruments, set up a template file with one of each box (redrum, dr.rex, maelstrom, subtraktor, NN19 & NNXT) with default/empty patches. as you go though your first bunch of remixes, you'll get to know what kinda sounds & patches are available and will probably develop a basic selection of patches that works for you.
• in case you didn't know, the drum track in midi files is usually on channel ten (sometimes you wont get instrument names in the files, just channel numbers - so that's handy to know).
• a few times i downloaded midi files that 'unexpectedly quit' reason - if this happens, the work around is to convert the the file to standard midi with quicktime (pro key required) (or any other midi converstion program).

site home back to BNH