3. Our Take On Remixing The Tijuana Taxi

I thought that a good project to try with the StikAx would be a hip-hop remix of Tijuana Taxi, by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Of course our samples weren't cleared, so we made a point to stay within the law by not distributing my creation.

Since we were trying to use only the TrakAx software to make my remix, we opted to load the hip hop beat off a sample CD rather than compose a beat in a different program. We assigned a 90 BPM hip hop loop from my sample CD, and changed the session tempo to match my beat. Then we loaded the Herb Alpert track to another button. For good measure, we loaded in a sample of a clap, as well as a simple bass line.

Now that we had the basic ingredients of the remix, the next step was to make everything fit together. Originally were trying to work with a different song whose tempo was a lot faster than the drum loop we used, but the TrakAx software couldn't match the two tempos. The real reason we used Tijuana Taxi is because it was closer to the drum loop's tempo, which allowed the TrakAx beat matching feature to do its job.

Next, we decided to cut a loop of the horns from this track, and we were pleased that the process was fairly intuitive. We needed to time stretch my bass line a little bit for it to fit with my main loop, but much to our irritation, there was no control over this process. The degrees of tempo change in TrakAx are either Very Slow, Slow, Medium, Fast, or Very Fast. Oh well, we ended up taking out the bass, and jamming with what we had.

Wattles

The Next phase of the TrakAx process was to render the Media Log, and then edit the events into a song. I noticed that our performance sounded different when we were jamming it out in real time, compared to the rendered version. There aren't any quantification controls in the TrakAx software, so we had to line up each event individually.

This would have been a lot easier if the timeline had a snap to grid feature, or an option to display bars and beats rather than minutes, seconds, and microseconds. With a little patience, we were able to work around this, and soon had our beat sounding close to completion.

Another inconvenience was that when sliding around regions of audio on the timeline, I couldn't drag one region through another to place it further down the timeline. A simple, but timely workaround was to copy the region that was in my way to a new track, move the desired region to its proper place, and then to move the first region back to its original track.