The "Other" Project

Another project that I have been working but have not discussed it on here is a remix of the entire Nine Inch Nails’ album “Year Zero”. 16 songs worth of material. It has proven to be a fun yet frustrating project for me. First of all, when do I use the source material and when do I use my own instrumentation? That is a hard question for me answer as each piece tends to call out for its own sound. Secondly, how do I make everything sound coherent? So far, there is continuity to all of my remixes stylistically but sonically they are somewhat mismatched. Once I get all of the remixes done, I plan to use Peak LE 5 to normalize everything and burn a cd and maybe add an overall eq to try and get everything matched up. Finally, how do I get the vocal snippets I use to sit firmly in time with everything else? This has proven to be the most difficult aspect of the project. Some work better than others. I thought Reason 4’s ReGroove mixer would do the trick and on some songs it has. I guess what I need to do is to sit down and try to program the drums around the vocal inflections of the Trent rather than trying to take his vocals and make them succumb to my own drum patterns. After listening to some of the other remixes on the community web site, I do not know how people get the vocals so perfectly locked into tempo, especially on songs where the remixer has radically increased the tempo. All that being said, you can check out my remixes here. I had planned on remixing about five songs from the NIN album “Ghosts” but I don’t know that I’ll have the desire for that once this project is done.