FMP - Development - Stay Focus Remix

As stated in the FMP proposal, I planned to make a remix for the track that Kiran and I are producing the music video for. I have also suggested producing a music video for this, as there is plenty of unused footage the content is available to do this. The track I have produced here is similar to the other work Stay Focus have done, the genre is a cross between Grime and Downtempo, the bassline is most defiantly Grime but the tempo is far slower than normal. With a BPM count of 97.5 it was difficult to develop a track that would compliment the vocals. The main problem I encountered is the chorus coming in on the last beat of the previous 16 bars, sung in an offbeat style, this didn't work with anything I produced so I made this and changed the chorus to make it on beat. This made it difficult to work with Gareths rap because it meant I had to cut the last beat of his 32 bar vocal. By adding rewind effects I managed to get around this by making it sound like it was meant to be produced this way making it sound like it had been mixed on decks. I have already had a good few compliments on this track with a few people saying its better than the original, however that is only a matter of opinion governed by taste in music. The influence is taken from the dubstep and drum & bass I used to mix although a much slower tempo than I'm used to, I guess this is the reason I chose to use an excessive amount of beats in each bar.

Sorry about the screenshots, they don't really show how I have produced this track. I started how you would go about making a track which involves laying the beat down first, however the next step was a little controversial. As I had to fit lyrics to this I decided to make sure the worked with the beat first, I tried a number of different styles from dub to garage and motown to trip hop. In the end I came up with this, I think the only way it could be described is downtempo drum & bass, if you like. The bass had already been planned out in my head, I knew I wanted a eccentuated raspy bassline that over powers everything else in the track, this has become popular on dancefloors throughout Europe in the past few years. When I dropped this in it seemed to work a treat with the beat and Gareths lyrics, however for Faadil's lyrics I had to break the song down and use a low frequency bass otherwise it sounded shockingly bad. I use a range of samples and Apple loops for the jingly bits, the apple loops I use were midi meaning I could change the notes to fit the rest of the tune. Unforuately blogger won't let me upload this tune so I'm afraid you will have to wait until I have done the video for it.