Zero To Hero: The Ursus Project – Remixes

I’m now just over a month into Data Transmission’s challenge to see if a bedroom DJ/producer can “make it” – get a track signed to a label, in just three months flat, with the help an an intensive online course from top online school Point Blank.

It’s been five weeks of intensive learning so far. A scary part of learning to produce is realising just how good even the simplest tracks are. Reading around the forums, one of the biggest barriers that a lot of aspiring producers face is actually finishing a track – something the guys at PB stress at a lot of the tutorials too. Learning so much in such a short space of time only exacerbates this – Ableton has gone from a grey expanse of frustration to a dazzling land of opportunity (like, I’m telling myself, my love life will if I ever get signed to a label). So last week, I found a way around this.

Remix Competitions

Aside from the obvious fact that they’re good for getting your name out there, you can win stuff, and the fact that before you hit ‘submit’ you have to tick a little box that says “your track now belongs to us. No ifs. No buts” which presumably is there to help prepare you for future meetings with A&R guys, remix competitions give you a format to work with: all the samples match up, and you already have an “example track” to go off. 

Global music juggernaut Beatport seem to have this pretty locked down – with regular remix competitions, so a few days ago I took the plunge and put something together, which has just uploaded, literally this second. 

Which, conveniently, now gives me something to go on my shiny, rather quiet new SoundCloud:

Bit of a departure from the original. But then, so was America, and its had a pretty good run.

So in the last post I mentioned attempting to break into something of a routine for production: there’s technical stuff, there’s sample selection and there’s musical knowledge. For the latter, PB has upped it’s game considerably over the last few days:

I’ve taken to practicing scales and my MIDI keyboard. Sounds very dull BUT it’s been amazingly useful for working out chords and melodies in my little projects so far.

The technical stuff has been a bit more straightforward as there seems to be an immense amount of both pros and keen amateurs out there happy to upload videos on every aspect of getting stuff sounding better:

Finally, having spent a good amount of time playing with the huge range of free sounds that Point Blank have on their site, I’ve decided to start buying in slightly more unusual samples to try and get a handle on ‘my own sound’. Loopmasters , are a sample-pack download site. You can spend scary amounts of cash here but then again I guess given you’re editing and chopping up samples (like eggs: they probably won’t kill you, but it’s best to never serve raw) you can use the same ones a few times over. I’ve gone ahead and bought a couple of new releases:

The advantage of this too is that I won’t spend hours trawling through ideas: but work within a range of samples I already have. Let’s hope I can get a new track out in a few days.

Next Time I’ll be looking at a new track, talking about Social Media and hopefully chatting to a label owner about what it takes to get signed to a record label!