STEWART COPELAND

Ok, I'll admit it...I'm the imposter.

I know this is really tacky...but nobody knows me here, so what the hell.

Vote for me!

http://www.realworldremixed.com/remix.p ... HQq1N5cEZk

I stumbled onto Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" remix contest at RealWorldRemixed.com and decided to give it a shot.

It's very cool to be able to hear the original source tracks, but they only give you snippets of every sound used in the song and not linear tracks. Anything that is linear, quickly drifts out of sync, so there is a lot of editing involved to get a groove going.

I wanted to keep the core of the song relatively intact, but give it a different twist so I turned it into an african VooDoo ceremony. I kept the vocals, bass and some keys from the original, and then added a bunch of alien sounding guitars, tribal percussion and Stewart Copelandish drums.

Kind of wacky...I know, but I think it sounds interesting.

I really liked Stewart's work with Peter Gabriel so it sounded like a good fit. I know Stewart would probably cringe, but I just tried to give it that "Jack Rabbit running around the drums" kind of feel to give it some energy.


The deadline is next week so I'm entering a little late, and they only way to get into the top 12 to have Peter Gabriel hear you stuff is to get enough votes on the site's registered user's top ten lists. People seem to be artificially "padding" their own ratings, so I'm not sure how they are realistically going to narrow things down to 12, but just participating has been fun.

Unfortunately they also have a 4.5MB file size limit so I had to squish it into a 112kbps MP3 so the sound is not that great.

Even if you don't vote, any feedback from drummers (or anyone else) would be appreciated as there is still time to make changes, and I'm still learning to mix (and to program drums).

The grand prize is an SSL Duende, so some of you musicians may want to try submitting something as well.

Thanks.

JL

That's the kind of contest I would love to enter...but no time this time!

You did a good job, really, you got a good taste; the only 'small' problem is about the vocals, I mean the space between the first few vocal lines, but as you said, that's your choice and it goes anyway.

Good luck!

i have been waiting for him to do something like this for a while. found out about it just a few days ago, way too late for me to get something suitable together. maybe next time.

good luck in the contest, your description sounds quite intriguing, but my slow connection doesn't allow for much streaming. i'm curious to hear if you have any rights to the recording. when public enemy did this a few years back, they allowed all the remixers to use their unchosen entries any way they wanted. which pretty much means that the pe are gonna eventually guest star on some future vf wing album. i'm guessing gabriel probably wasn't so gracious with his own work. please illuminate!

Thanks for the kind words Gio.

I was trying to please myself rather than to win a contest. Personally I think people should be concentrating on making a version that supports the vocal and lyric rather than trying to win a "remix" competition. I'm still stuck in the '80s musically, so a lot of the "contemporary" versions don't have much appeal. There are some cool ideas on some of the remixes though.

Jedsoon, unfortunately the terms and conditions you have to agree to are pretty strict in terms of usage. Basically you can only use the samples for personal use, and only post it on their site.

It was a lot of fun to put together, and it helped me practice my drum programming so it was worth it. 80% of the percussion was actually me banging on Tupperware (I'm not a drummer either), but nobody has noticed it yet so it must sound OK i guess. I'm thinking about doing a Punk version just for the hell of it.

Rgds,

JL