Remixing & Genre Shaping

Remixing is a form of making music where you edit and change someone else's finished work to create something new. It is done through using a VST (Virtual Studio Technology) music program to edit elements of a song.

## VSTs

- Logic Pro

- Fruity Loops Studio

- Ableton

- Reason

- Adobe Premiere

## Sampling

Remixing and Sampling go hand in hand, as the same methods of making music are used, and the line between Remixing and Sampling is very blurred. Sampling gained popularity as a way to make music in the 70s and 80s, and has been a staple of both Electronic and Hip-Hop music ever since then. Sampling is taking a piece of another already finished product and using it in your own musical creation. The screencast video on the right provides two examples of sampling in Electronic Music. UK Duo Snakehips samples an early 2000 R&B song by Cheri Dennis, while Daft Punk samples an old Barry Manilow song for one of the hits off of their Discovery album. The Snakehips song uses the quick snippet as the main hook as the song builds up, and then the duo Chops up the Vocal to provide one of the primary elements in the drop (also known as the 'Chorus'). Sampling can range from using just a tiny snippet of a song like in this example used, or a huge part of another song (See: Kanye West's "Stronger" & Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger")

Daft Punk is a good example of an electronic artist that used Sampling to shape their music.

## Remixing & Participatory Culture

Remixing is sampling at a larger level. Instead of sampling a part of the song, you are taking the entire song and making it your own. It can be as simple as changing the “drop” in an electronic song to changing many of the elements to make it sound entirely different. In Today’s electronic music era, Remixing and Participatory culture go hand in hand. The artists of today come from the audience of the last 5 years. Instead of radio stations and record labels determining the new and rising genres, it is the audience. This directly relates to Jay Rosen's point in relation to the audience in Web 2.0 in his article "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." Creativity through remixes of existing songs has gone on to shape some of the most popular electronic genres today, such as Electronic Trap and Future Bass.

One example of this is the genre Moombahton. In the late 2000’s a local DJ in Washington DC named Dave Nada slowed down a House song by Producer Afrojack, and the genre of Moombahton was born. It was a simple edit to a remix that helped spawn a genre that combined elements of Dutch House music with Latin Reggaeton. Through Participatory Culture the genre spread and grew as the audience created new and innovative Moombahton tracks. It advanced the genre of Electronic Music by combining it with Latin elements, one of the main reasons so many people were attracted to the genre as it started to spread. As Henry Jenkins said in 'If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Six),' "Content is spread based not on an individual evaluation of worth, but on a perceived social value within community or group." The genre has gone on to start the careers of some of electronic music’s biggest artists today. The audience has gone on to shape this genre in many more ways as the years have gone by, with many "sub-genre's" being born from combining Moombahton with other existing genres.

One reason the art of Remixing has blown up today is that it takes power out of record labels and into the hands of the Audience. As Brian Ray states in 'More than Just Remixing,' "The rapid dissemination of such texts and their accompanying ideological visions through popular sites such as YouTube, where participants can share content quickly and spread a popular video text to thousands upon thousands of other “users,” means that we may be witnessing a changing public sphere..." While this specific quote is talking about Videos, it applies to the same ideas for music.

1. ↑ Rosen, Jay. "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." Social Media Reader (n.d.): 13-16. 2012. Web.
2. ↑ Jenkins, Henry. "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead: Media Viruses and Memes." (2009): n. pag. 11 Feb. 2009.Web.
3. ↑ Ray, Brian. "More Than Just Remixing: Uptake and Media Composition." Computers & Composition 30 (2013): 183-196. Web.