In the dreaded days of disco, the 12" single made great(?) strides. Some songs had extended versions, while others had radically different versions altogether. Remixes were really big in the 80’s & 90’s.
Does the artist usually have a say in how a song is remixed or are they done by the record company? I’ve heard a few where extra vocals are inserted so I wondered if they came from the recording session and not used in the final product or the artist went back to the studio to record them.
It really depends. For a lot of the bands I listen to, they usually have a list of people they’d like to have remixing their songs. These can include DJ’s, other bands, producers, and the like. They get in contact with that person, discuss the fee, etc.
At that point, the remixer is provided with separated tracks of the song - isolated percussion loops, synth loops, guitars, vocals, etc. They pretty much just rebuild the song as they see fit, keeping what they like, leaving out what they don’t, writing their own music to fill it out, and re-order the parts of the song.
When they’re done with it, they send it back to the band and the band/label decide if it’s fit for release. If not, they let it sit. If so, they put it out however they see fit. Either way, the remixer has done his/her job, so they get paid.
A lot of bands these days will provide their fans with isolated sounds from some of their songs so that the fans can make their own remixes. It’s actually great fun and can sometimes yield surprisingly good results.
I can offer the example of Paul McCartney (!), who was into techno club music. He got into remixing his new tracks big time, starting in 1985, with the “Press To Play” album. He worked with a lot of producers and engineers on that album, resulting in a lot of different versions of the songs. So you can get different edits and mixes of most of the tracks on the album. “Press” itself was first mixed by Hugh Padgham (Genesis, Phil Collins) to sound one way, then given to the team of Bert Bevans & Steve Forward, who did a complete remake of the sound, according to their own vision. And there are fairly massive differences between the two.
On the remixes, you can hear that all the constituent parts of the song have been sampled and entered into a keyboard. So the backing tracks are looped, individual elements are assigned to different keys, and they pop up here and there, echoed, flanged, pitch-shifted, etc. Paul will have played all of these elements, and recorded a version which may have gone on 7-10 minutes. The extra sounds in the remixes came from the parts that were edited out for the LP version and the 7" version.
Then he’d put all these mixes out on a baffling array of 7" 45 RPM singles, 10" 45 RPM singles, 12" singles in one or two or possibly even three different special issues - each different, 3" limited edition CDs issued only in Japan, bonus tracks on promo CDs… and he has never reissued a single one of them, ever. To get all the remixes of all the songs from just “Press” that were remixed, you have to buy about $200 worth of records and CDs! (We won’t talk about the version of the album that was on the street for less than a week, until he had it pulled and reissued with different mixes…)
If you have a Mac & Garageband, you can try your own remix of NIN’s The Hand That Feeds
Simon & Garfunkel’s first big hit, Sounds of Silence, was originally just Paul and Artie and an acoustic guitar. The single went nowhere. Back in the studio, an electric guitar and such were dubbed onto the original tracks. The electric remix was boffo, and the rest is history.
Thanks to good software and a little skill on the part of the remixer, it’s really not that hard. The skill comes in knowing how to isolate the original into separate tracks. Depending on how the original was produced, it’s either relatively easy to do this, or it’s a cast-iron bitch. I tried it once, and couldn’t quite get it.
That said, remixing is really not my thing, but I’ve got friends who do it who love it.
Robin