3FM Battlemix

Introduction: When I first heard the new track "All For You" by Miss Jackson, sometime near the end of march 2001, immediately this thought came to my mind: Where have I heard that backing-track/loop before? Yes, it's from a song by one of my all-time favourite 80's dance groups: Change. After locating the Change album in my collection, and listening to the track "The Glow Of Love" I got this idea: I'm gonna make a combimix of this original track and the new song by Miss Jackson. So the first two weeks of april 2001, during some of my spare time, I started working on it, and here is the final result. Please pay special attention to the break around 2:55, it has some nice stereo effects (play it on your headphones!)

• Tracks used:
• Janet Jackson - All For You (videomix, CDS)
• Change - The Glow Of Love (1981, album version from the CD "Collection" 1986 )
• some vocal samples from older Janet Jackson material.
• Tools used:
• Plextools for Digital Audio Extraction of the CD tracks that were used. Mixed in Vegas Audio v2.0. Prosoniq EZTimestretch, for timestretching Janet's track upto 119bpm. Lame v3.88 alpha, for MP3 encoding
• This combimix was played several times on Radio 3FM by Patrick Kicken and Edwin Diergaarde in the "Interactive Cyber Top 50". The radio-debut was on Easter sunday (april 15th 2001), and the following weeks it was played again at least 5 times on 3FM (that I know of). Even though the presenter (Patrick Kicken) did not mention the maker's name, it made me very proud that my remix was received so well and got much positive feedback.

(04:23)| 15-04-2001

Shaggy - It wasn't me

• Natural Born Chillers - the funky beats

(08:40)| 12-06-2001

Janet Jackson - All 4 U

• Will Smith - MIB
• Some remixfriends from mixfreaks allready made some mixes with Janet's track. TDD tried to match some accapellas's with Janet's track and Will Smith's MIB fitted just fine. He used Magix Music Maker Deluxe to mix the tracks together.

Life vs Just An Illusion van Imagination

The second remix for Corne Klijns Disco Classics party on TROS radio 3FM is a combination of two discoclassics from the same year: 1982.

• I was playing ‘Just An Illusion’ by Imagination and thought that it could be mixed with 'Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’ by Indeep. I‘ve got the 12” of 'Last Night...' and it features an acapella (vocals-only version) of this track. I played it on my turntable and matched the pitch with the Imagination song. Than I sampled the acapella at the right pitch in my Akai S 6000 sampler. The next thing to do was to time-stretch the Indeep vocals because the tempo must be the same as ‘Just An Illusion’.
• I used the Imagination song as the ‘vehicle’ for this mix, adding the vocals and some guitar and beatsamples from Indeep. I also filtered and sliced a vocal part of Imagination. As a final ingredient I added an extra rap after the "listen up to your local DJ" part. The raps of ‘I Know You Got Soul’ by Eric B. And Rakim (1987) sound very nice over the beats and bassline of ‘Just An Illusion’.

The latest single by Coldplay, Clocks, is featured on their album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head'. I made a remix of this track.

• It's a very nice song, with a beautifull pianomelody. Because of this melody and the BPM of 'Clocks' (around 131 beats per minute), the song has some dance-remix potential. There are allready some unofficial remixes of this song and I wanted to create my own dance-version of it.
• I started with some ticking clock sounds, in the same tempo as the song. Than I filtered the piano-melody. I added a spacey stringsound to match this. I also added different basslines. A basic repeating one, than a rumbling bass sound and two acid-basslines, which I filtered. TR 909/ 808 percussion (bass, claps and hihats) were used to make a dance rhythm. I streched some of the vocal parts, because the tempo wasn't always exactly the same. In the middle of the track I created a breakdown. From here the track evolved in a trancey sphere, with the piano part filtered slowly underneath the sounds. In this way, the song builds up to a second vocal part.
• I've got the feeling that I could have done more with a trancey 'main' melody. But at the same time I think there are allready to many songs with an 'epic' trance-sound. Perhaps something to freak with in a next remix: "How to make a catchy trance tune, without sounding cheesy." I hope I added some cool dance-feeling to this allready beatifull Coldplay song.
• Corne Klijn played this remix on his radio show Kort en Klijn on radio 3FM on Saturday April 5th.