Bass Music Sessions remixes: part 2 - Matthew Hiscock
July 7
On to part two of these remixes, and I'm happy to bring you this one from Matthew Hiscock, of Canada. He went in a completely different direction to Gaskel Greed, and has come up with a wicked, no-genre, skippy, beatsy thing. We particularly liked what he did with the orchestra sample, where he made quite a catchy riff from it, which is both memorable, and kind of related to the original. I'd say this was our favourite mix, thanks to its originality and sense of fun. Anyway, here's Matthew to talk you through it:
Please introduce yourself! Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Matthew Hiscock. I also produce and dj as Hissy Fit. I'm Canadian. I live in Montreal but I'm originally from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Come visit - both are very nice places for a vacation. I run the Make Some Bass blog and write sporadically about music in various other places.
Tell us about your producing background - how did you get started, how long have you been producing, etc, any proud achievements?
My background is as a recording engineer. I did a 2-year program in engineering, graduating just as the ADAT was making large studios, which otherwise would have been employing the likes of me, obsolete. After working a couple of years overseas in Manchester and London, I returned to Canada and started a label called Bodega Audio - more on the melodic tech house side of things - and mainly released my own stuff for a few years until I realised that running a label is annoying. The first three releases were on vinyl and coincided with the crash of vinyl sales in 2004/2005. I switched to just digital and it went pretty well for a few years, until I started to feel like this guy.Good learning experience, though. Everyone should start a label, then immediately stop.
What were you trying to do with this remix? Do you think you succeeded?
There are a few things the original does really well and I wanted to not use any of those things. Mainly the huge difference in tempo (122bpm(?) vs 140bpm [note - it's actually 122.5 bpm. Sorry if that confused anyone!]) meant I'd have to do that anyway. The way the kick and the bass sit together in the original really works, so I chopped the bass up into individual notes and just shoved around the parts until something clicked. I wanted a really busy kick and a beat that's not straight dubstep or garage. I think the tune started out as just kick and bass, until I felt that was solid.After that I wanted something with a lot of sampling and playing with pitch, making melodies using pitched samples instead of synthesizing them. I must have been on an old skool/James Blake tip that day. I put the string hits in the EXS24 and played around until I had something that sounded alright - that's what starts off the tune. Then I put that through a phaser, for that extra psychedelic kick. Both the "ha!" and the "the drop" samples were originally played all across the keyboard until I realised it was beyond even my tolerance for pitched retro tackiness, so I tamed it down for the "ha!" and nuked it for the "the drop" sample.There was loads of good stuff to work with in the source files so the only real production I added, besides drums, was the lead line at 0:41 and 2:17 plus the build at 2:30.The original is a straight-up dancefloor thumper and I knew I couldn't really out-thump it, so I went weird. I think it worked, though I'm amazed anyone else likes it.
More from Mr Hiscock at these links: http://www.matthewhiscock.com http://soundcloud.com/matthewhiscock/
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Posted by bassmusic
