Deep Cut are a London-based, girl-fronted guitar band whose lineage can be traced back through Death In Vegas (both Mat Flint and I were long term contributors to that band/project) and previously Revolver, who Mat fronted in the early ’90s. The band have released two self-produced albums on Club AC30, and recently started work on the third record.
Outside the band itself, Mat and his brother Simon also DJ, and are big fans of hip-hop, electro and techno, so when Deep Cut began to be asked to remix tracks for other bands and labelmates, it was a good chance to expand the profile of our own production team and help out the bands and AC30. Working with a more danceable, repetitive, less song-based approach is a different discipline – and the idea of remixes done by ‘bands’ rather than DJs is refreshing too.
The first remix was for Ringo Deathstarr’s ‘Shadow’ in late 2011. Mat and Simon had pretty much got the whole thing together themselves in Cubase, and I joined them for the final stage of transferring the project into Logic for the final mix and mastering using the plug-ins I have.
There’s a whole other essay that could be written here about transferring projects between platforms, or the last-minute mastering of the whole EP for iTunes Japan, but I’m going to concentrate here on another remix we did this year, for Daniel Land & The Modern Painters’ ‘Eyes Wide Shut’.
I’m choosing this one because by this point we’ve established a way of working whereby we act as a proper threesome: I’m involved at an earlier stage and we work in Logic for most of the time, which is easier and eliminates the project-transfer issue.
The process usually begins with Si and Mat getting the original mix and the track stems from AC30 or the band, and deciding on an overall approach, perhaps taking a stylistic reference from another record or band, and deciding how it should sound overall. They’ll also work through the stem tracks and decide on which elements we’ll keep, chop them up, work out a tempo and make the loops we’ll later arrange.
I get a message from Mat a week or so before we’ve arranged to get together to do the mix. He’s had the idea to do it with a Bo Diddley-type loop/beat instead of the original drums, and is asking for suggestions on where to get the loop from, so we rack our brains for tunes we think might have the right beat. We mentally audition classic Generation X, Jesus & Mary Chain, Bow Wow Wow, even Diddley himself. I send Mat a link to the Only Ones’ song ‘Me And My Shadow’, and he reckons it’s already close to the tempo of Daniel’s track and feels right, so we decide to go for that. 
At this point I don’t have the stems, but I take the original mix of 'Eyes Wide Shut', import it into Logic and establish that the tempo is 82bpm. It’s then a case of trying to find usable loops from the Only Ones track and match them to the tempo and key of Dan’s track. I edit and save two different loops -- both have drums, guitar and bass in them, one has more percussion -- and use simple time-stretching to make them both fit the project tempo. I then use Logic's Pitch Shifter to detune both loops by a few semitones so they’re in the key of the song. These two processes obviously have an effect on the quality and tone of the samples, but we all like the slightly degraded, slowed-down effect. I save the tuned loops as new audio files and wait for the stems to arrive via WeTransfer.
Once I have them, I can get the Logic project ready, with the stems Mat & Si have chosen to include plus the loops, all lined up and ready before we meet up. This mix is a little different from the ones we’ve done before, in that we’ve decided to base it on the whole vocal and arrangement rather than build it from short fragments or loops. The framework of the song is there from the start, and the plan is to add more effects and instrumentation around the vocals.
We usually convene on a Saturday round at Mat and (Deep Cut singer & lyricist) Emma’s place in Leytonstone – we set up through the mixer and speakers in the living room, where Mat’s decks are. It’s a very easy-going atmosphere; Mat and Emma’s two young daughters Chloe and Lara are often around, and it’s a standing joke among us that we have to mix with either cartoons, football or darts on TV in the background...
Around lunchtime we begin working. I’ve set up some send effects in the project -- favourites at the moment are the GSI Type 4 Spring Reverb, their GS201 Tape Echo and their (free) Watkat. They are great, vintage-sounding plug-ins and essentially mono effects, which I like in terms of being able to place them in the mix. The delays in particular work like the hardware unit's they're emulating, in that you can’t sync them to any tempo: they’re based on the tape-head position of the real unit, which I love, because delays that are loose or move across the beats are much more interesting than sync'ed ones. I’ve set up the spring reverb on an effects bus on its own, plus two GS201s on two more effects busses: one with a straight delay, and a second with more feedback, and being fed through the Spin Box Leslie simulator from Logic’s pedalboard.
I think this is a good point to say that I’m not going to detail every process and move in the remix here – that would be highly dull! – but here are a few selected highlights.
Drums: The Only Ones loops carry the track most of the way; I edit them so that there isn’t a cymbal crash every bar, and bring in the second layer of the loop later in the track. We keep the original shaker and tambourine from Dan’s live percussion, and we program a four-to-the-floor kick drum that adds another gear-change to the later part of the track.
Guitars: Mat plays in three layers of a Diddley-type guitar loop to overlay what’s there. There are clean, distorted, and single-string versions, and we end up using two of them as the track builds.
We also add two tracks of random guitar noise/feedback/whammy atmosphere, where Mat lays the Fender Jaguar on its back and tickles and taps it to get some great unplanned, intuitive twangs and hums. This kind of thing happens a lot in a Deep Cut mix: we often use a Korg Kaossilator, or atonal guitar/synth drones and feedback to add layers of less music, more noise. It’s what we like.
Bass: For a long time we have two bass lines going on: the loop that Mat & Si have made, plus the original bass line, through a trashy amp sim with the low end rolled off, which is defining the chord progression. After an hour or two we realise that we don’t need the original one in, as there’s enough going on in the other instruments.
Synths: We add a transistor organ part for the refrain/chorus using another great GSI product, the VB3, and then move on to add another common Deep Cut ingredient: a couple of arpeggiated synth parts that work against each other. We set up an arpeggiator in Logic’s Environment, and Si plays in two different lines using sounds we’ve made on the ES1 and ESM synths. One has a time signature in 3/4 so it moves against the general 4/4 feel of the rest of the track to create a kind of rolling, changing pulse. We also add a high synth string note which fades in during the breakdown section of the song.
Vocals: We mainly use Dan’s single lead vocal. There are harmonies throughout most of the original track, but we use these sparingly to lift things where needed. We also edit the chorus so that the lyrics repeat his ‘close my eyes’ line more often, to simplify and hammer home the hook. There’s a stem of block backing vocals and harmonies that Dan has called ‘choir’: this is sent heavily through the Leslie echo to swamp it in swirly delays, and it’s also chopped and muted randomly so the echoes just spin away on their own.
Arrangement: Dan’s original song format is there as the basis for this mix, but we decide to extend a section after the second chorus. We let the beats fall away and we’re left with the synth lines, effects and pulses hanging there. This is where we listen over to the section, making it longer each time, bringing in different elements, letting the arpeggiators burble away. The idea is to lose the sense of the beat and let this section go on almost beyond the point where it’s predictable or bearable, before the last section kicks back in. It’s a widely used idea, and we’re not trying to be too smart about it, but it works, and the only way we can really do it is by trial and error and listening to the section in context. Just when it feels like the beat might come back in -- that’s the point to make it go on a few bars longer!
And so by the time we get to seven o’clock, and a curry has been ordered, we’ve basically finished. We check the mix with a little mastering processing added from Izotope's Ozone 4 -- a modified ‘rock master’ preset where I vary the amount of compression by riding the input fader -- and bounce an MP3 to send over to Dan and Robin at AC30.
I take the project home to listen on my own speakers and check things. The vocals need to go up a bit and the high strings need to come in a little earlier. Almost simultaneously I get an email from Mat saying the same thing...