an underrated part of knowing how to use a DAW is that if i ever hear a song and think "i wish they did this part a little differently", i can just, like, change it. like i can make my own personal version that's tweaked in small ways which sound better to me. not enough people do this i think.
an easy way to get started is to use a site like mvsep.com to split the stems, and then just import them into a DAW and start tweaking shit! pitch shift some stuff, add in a drum fill somewhere, cut out a section if the song drags for too long, change the tempo, etc. i've even mixed in stems from leaked demo tracks of songs, if i wish stuff wasn't cut out.
you probably don't have the same taste in music as me, but i'm sure you can think of at least one song which is almost great but just has one little thing holding it back. or maybe a song that you really like but is too repetitive. or maybe you always harmonize to a song when you sing along to it, but the song itself doesn't include any harmonies. once you start making personal remixes of songs, you start to hear stuff everywhere. even in songs that you love, there's usually small ways to tweak it to make it suit your personal taste, even if you don't think the original song is "worse off" without them.
this blog post is actually just an excuse to show off some of the "remixes" i've made. but i guess you could look at these as inspiration, or something:
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this one has a bit of everything: mixed in stems from the demo track and even the live version, yoshi bongos, increased tempo, pitch shifting the melody and adding some crunchy harmonies, vocal effects, i honestly put so much attention to detail into this one and i can't enumerate everything i did here, but yeah it's all fun :)
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betty but it's heavenly: without official instrumental, with
i never uploaded the full version of this, cuz i don't think there's enough substantial changes to call it a "remix", it's all minor stuff. but i do have the very end, since that's different enough. i added a bunch of new vocals, and added a heavenly sounding chromatic harmony. and my friend contributed a new instrumental. the full version contains more pitch shifting and harmonies, as well as EQ changes in some places.
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rockefeller street nightcore remix
this one's simple enough. just a higher quality version of the original, with some annoying high-pitched stuff removed, and some EQ changes to make the bass stand out more. i also added new soup "bah"s in the middle lol
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wow i'm not crazy without the awful ear-piercing high-pitched squeaks
this one is self-explanatory. i didn't even need a DAW for this one, i literally just used audacity to isolate the frequencies of the squeaks and remove them, since no one had done that yet. this is the simplest kind of change you can make, and like, idk, i think it's cool that you can just Do that. if there's a great song that has one element of it that ruins it, you can literally just change it, no one's stopping you
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the song is sped up and pitched up 3 semitones, but the vocals don't sound squeaky like they do in literally every other version of this song i've found. this song doesn't work with the nightcore treatment, but it's better when pitched up and sped up. this was also an excuse to make a fun music video for the song lol
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this is my favorite ajr song ever, and it was never even released. other people have made remastered versions of this, but i don't really like any of them; they all sound a bit incomplete to me. so i made my own. it mixes the stems with bummerland (the track this eventually turned into), and does a secret thing halfway through ;)
there's some others as well but i think that's a pretty good selection
it's really fun! join the dark side! or something like that