Today we’re featuring a brand new live remix from longform controllerism specialist Izn. Izn has taken a whole set of tracks from the San Francisco-based Dirtybird crew and built out some fantastic finger drumming routines, also incorporating a few live musicians and performers to play alongside him, including DJTT’s own Ryan Dejaegher (you might have chatted with him on the Live Chat on the DJTT online store or seen one of his recent tutorials). Watch the video below and then read details from Izn after that:
In this project, I have live remixed a number of songs from one of my favourite record labels: Dirtybird. They have also been interviewed by DJTT before. I used two Maschines (with two instances running in Ableton) and teamed up with four other musicians in this video. This video features a trumpet player, a turntablist (DJTT staff member Ryan!), a keyboard player, a vocalist and myself. We are getting to the point where we can use these technologies as instruments and working with other live musicians reflects that belief.
Some technical aspects:
I started off by chopping up a number of Dirtybird tracks. I rearranged these cuts, put them together with samples from other Dirtybird tracks and some of my own material. The whole idea was to use pieces of the original to create something that had a completely different vibe. As with my previous routines, it was my goal to balance technicality, showmanship and musicality.
Although I have featured other artists in my previous videos, this video is definitely my most collaboration heavy. Each of the featured artists was given a bit of direction, but was ultimately had a fair amount of freedom over how they wanted to go about recording their parts. For example, Derek the trumpet player re-did the “Steven Jello” melody, and then went on to freestyle the rest of his part. Fellow DJ, nerd mastermind and djtt wizard Ryan was on the turntables in this project. He was using scratching and using his pitch control mapping with the Z2 to manipulate the vocal from “Yo Vogue”, while I was flipping the beat from “Plasma Jelly”.
Want to get started building your own Maschine-based remixes? Grab one in the DJTT store here (includes the Maschine software for sampling and remixing)
