How do you rebuild a 30 year old track ?

[Uman's]

Hi all,

I have industrial quantities of this old stuff on my own.

Some of you say that I can find catchy melodies but my choice of genre and technique is not good.
I agree with that.

Although I have since moved on to more conventional styles, I would like to
recover this style that was particular to me and resume its development.
(For the moment, I have posted on the forum only my oldest songs under "Reason")

The track shown here (1991) is made from multiple old hardwares devices.
Although I have subsequently known quality devices like the Korg-M1 or the Yamaha Dx7
before leaving for Reason V2.5, I have long used low-end devices like here.

I started with my small financial means.

Boss Dr550 / Yamaha Pss 780 / Yamaha Shs-10
A basic hardware mixer and tape recorder to ear and save.
No midi file, no backup.
We record on audio cassette and erase all the machines to move on to the next track.

No real sequencer, Just very short banks of prepared notes,
I pressed the buttons and played the notes as the track scrolls!

Very frustrating !

Could you tell me how to use the melody of this track and in which musical style I should orient it ?

Thanks for help

[bxbrkrz]

Hi all,

I have industrial quantities of this old stuff on my own.

Some of you say that I can find catchy melodies but my choice of genre and technique is not good.
I agree with that.

Although I have since moved on to more conventional styles, I would like to
recover this style that was particular to me and resume its development.
(For the moment, I have posted on the forum only my oldest songs under "Reason")

The track shown here (1991) is made from multiple old hardwares devices.
Although I have subsequently known quality devices like the Korg-M1 or the Yamaha Dx7
before leaving for Reason V2.5, I have long used low-end devices like here.

I started with my small financial means.

Boss Dr550 / Yamaha Pss 780 / Yamaha Shs-10
A basic hardware mixer and tape recorder to ear and save.
No midi file, no backup.
We record on audio cassette and erase all the machines to move on to the next track.

No real sequencer, Just very short banks of prepared notes,
I pressed the buttons and played the notes as the track scrolls!

Very frustrating !

Could you tell me how to use the melody of this track and in which musical style I should orient it ?

Thanks for help

I don't know anything about which musical style you should do, but I wanted to rebuild an old song from a very old cassette too.

First I had to make sure the loops were perfect, coming from a bad cassette and a cheap $20 cassette player.
Some loops had to be 1 bar, half a bar, etc, until the time stretching felt right, like the original tempo on my Atari. Then I turned the bits into rex loops, then moving the slices around when needed.

My brute force technique was to turn the song into multiple small rex loops. I exploded the notes into multiples tracks the best I could, fine tuning the slices and keep the timing as tight as possible. I changed the project to a crazy slow tempo, so I could play the main instruments with the same groove. But that was with one song, not a ton of them.

[Enlightenspeed]

Hi,

What exactly are you wanting to do, rewrite the track and rebuild it?

Perhaps for some new perspective on this style you should have a listen to some LCD Soundsystem or maybe some Justice? This is really to analyse what those guys did with this sort of style, and perhaps take some notes on that.

Other than that we need to know what exactly you want to do, as there are lots of ways to go about this.

Cheers,
Brian

[crimsonwarlock]

You could try to remake the specific sounds with what you have available in Reason. That way, you would learn a lot about sound design in the process.

Rob Papaen did a live-stream recently about this, rebuilding his eighties hit track Aurora:

[Uman's]

Thank you for these well-focused reviews.

My brute force technique was to turn the song into multiple small rex loops. I exploded the notes into multiples tracks the best I could, fine tuning the slices and keep the timing as tight as possible.

It's probably the only method to guarantee to keep the sounds of the song but it's a long long work.
I still remember when I started to sample the sounds of my Roland CR78 or my Korg M1.
Wanting to integrate them into Reason, I couldn't go to the end.

What exactly are you wanting to do, rewrite the track and rebuild it?

Yes, rebuilding it without necessarily adopting its style.

Perhaps for some new perspective on this style you should have a listen to some LCD Soundsystem or maybe some Justice? This is really to analyse what those guys did with this sort of style, and perhaps take some notes on that.

Funny that you point to these artists that I listen to a lot but I can't extrapolate with them.
I don't see how to interpret them for my own style.

You could try to remake the specific sounds with what you have available in Reason. That way, you would learn a lot about sound design in the process.

It is my intention, to recreate the most interesting sounds of the basic track and to revise the score completely.
I hope that 30 years later, I would be able once inside to see how things are changing.
The overall sound will be different and the rendering too.

I have a certain habit of manipulating synths but certain sounds of the original track are going to be more complicated than it seems (FM).
I found in the bank of reason, the sound of drums called "Hiq" and it already took me more than 3 hours !

The whole is likely to pose significant problems as the progress is made.