House Country

Multitrack Remix

About the Remix

For my remix, I created a short transition from a fiddle solo into a house beat. This project was the most difficult for me. I have no previous experience in electronic music or remixing, and before starting the Recording Arts and Technology program at Tri-C, I had not considered exploring it. With not knowing how to approach this project, I initially wanted to play it safe and do an acoustic version of the original song: however, David Kennedy, my professor for Capstone, advised me to do something that added value for the original musician.

I took his advice and reworked the original song into House Country. The genre has a classic four-to-the-floor house beat that intertwines with country music elements. Steal guitar and twangy vocals are often the musical elements of country music that are chosen to mix into the house beat; however, fiddle and acoustic guitars are also used in this genre.

The Process

A couple of examples of this House Country are ‘Hard To Forget’ by Sam Hunt and ‘Miles On It’ by Marshmello and Kane Brown.

‘Hard To Forget’ was my main inspiration for this remix. Similar to how it samples ‘There Stands the Glass’ by Webb Pierce, I sampled ‘Ain’t Like The Rest,’ the song I used for my mixdown.

I sampled the main fiddle solo from ‘Ain’t Like The Rest’ and layered it with fiddle “chops” that I sampled from different parts of the song, similar to how the into to ‘Hard To Forget’ is part of ‘There Stands the Glass’. Then, I transitioned the fiddle into the beat of the kick drum. Rather than using a pre-made drum loop, I created my own drums using MIDI. Finally, I layered a background “Hard Rain” and “Ocean” effect samples on the drums.

While mixing, I added a lot of reverb to everything because the other House Country songs had a lot of reverb. I also added some compression on the fiddle parts that I sampled. As for the MIDI elements, I slightly adjusted the velocity of the different notes to humanize them. I wanted these elements to sound programmed but not completely robotic.

To finish my mix, I committed my drums, added fades and volume automation, along with a 3:1 slow attack compressor and a touch of a chamber verb to my master fader. Then, I mastered the levels according to Soundcloud’s guidelines using iZotope RX 11.