personal opinions

i wouldnt advise getting into remixing until learning the basics: what a scale is, what a chord is, what chord progressions are. how the DAW works (takes ages to learn all the hundreds of functions in a DAW). what different instruments are, how effects like reverb, delay and distortions work to alter sounds. its a lot to learn. what samples are typically used. maybe even subtractive synthesis basics. how the frequency spectrum works. what the harmonic series is. what an EQ does, basics of how compression works.

this is a wild opinion... i also wouldnt advise learning too much music theory... 'music theory' is mostly a marketing gimmick and an institution to extract money from novices. i think the more 'music theory' people learn, the more they forget about the golden rule of music... if it sounds good it is good. the music theory you don't understand is the music theory you need to know.. this mumbo jumbo.

but whatever learn as much music theory as you want, what do i know. the basics of chords and scales you need to know anyway. and it takes a long time to learn how a DAW works anyway. theres youtube channels nowadays that cover pop music theory. one that comes to mind is called 'Make Pop Music'... so for instance, vocals in pop music have sort of specific slightly-complex processing chains that are now pretty standard across mainstream pop-relative music... music theory is great if you're learning this kind of technical stuff. maybe you don't listen to pop, maybe you want to remix something else, idk. maybe music theory is awesome. but its also possible that there are elements of music theory that are marketing or out-dated institution or money making method... end rant

i like jazz i like different unorthodox scales... maybe there is some good parts about music theory if you can somehow filter out what isnt so good about it....... idk i think music education is pretty bad. improvization isn't typically taught to pianists is what im thinking of... robotically play sheet music written 200+ years ago and waffle on about 'interpretations'.... if you're going to pay someone to teach you music... i would go with learning the drums and find a drum teacher. pretty sure drummers are all taught how to improvise. probably guitar teachers as well. don't pick any instrument that can be seen in an orchestra.

what are the pitfalls of learning a DAW... idk... you can find youtube tutorials for anything. i guess watching too many youtube tutorials would be a pitfall of electronic music theory learning.

electronic music looks kind of stagnant atm. the market is saturated with lots of people who have no background in traditional music which has both pros and cons (caus of the rise of laptop processing power etc in last 10 yrs). electronic music feels kind of stagnant in a lot of genres. since this is personal opinions... i like hip hop beat makers... the mentality of finishing a beat in half an hour and then moving on to the next beat. it's an adjacent sort of mindset to 'daily art club' in a way. doing something every day. then making something else the next day. although this streak is also for big projects and you can upload small steps too so yeah but similar maybe in some ways. if you go on beatstars and just listen to whatevers popular theres usually some good stuff happening... hip hop beats are going strong atm in the world of electronic music i think. but a lot of specific EDM genres feel kind of stagnant imo... pop music is still good i think. dunno. thats bout all i listen to so not the widest taste. if you want a genre recommendation theres a subset of EDM called 'wave'. some of its alright... dubstep is kind of dead. riddim sucks. maybe progressive house is still going. people keep saying every yr that DnB is gonna come back but im not hearing much new DnB shit. theres a genre called 'car music' or 'slap house' that i think is pretty alright... some good stuff there. 'cyberpunk' is another genre. or maybe its cyberwave. ive checked out hyperpop and i dont really get it. so theres some possible genre recommendations. id probably say hiphop beats is about the only genre of electronically-made music thats pushing the medium forward much atm. thats a very subjective opinion. but all those genres i just listed look pretty dead (generally). hip hop is going strong worldwide. and the beatmakers are cranking out way more music. whereas the edm scene in general is a lot of marketing nothingness atm. all the accountants and socialmedia influencers and all that rolled into edm and it looks pretty boring atm. to be honest i dont follow edm that much... but ahhh i just havent heard much good edm. i like the song... ill link it... statues by droeloe and moonzz... that is a cool song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUMqVG8ECys what will the next big genre be... dont know. i dont rlly look for new music enough but if you dig through soundcloud for long enough (even though soundcloud is 'dead' and overrun by bots), you will find good stuff from ANY genre eventually. but im just talking about the genres in general. 10 yrs ago there was melodic dnb, melodic dubstep progressive house trap dubstep chillstep hardstyle all seemed pretty good. now the main genre is like.. riddim... blargh. hyperpop... wtf is deal with hyperpop. hyperpop reminds me of scene/emo music but not as good as that was. i think the 'wave' subset of edm is cool though... some of it is alright. but mostly edm is overrun by social media cogturners and marketing and nothingness and just stagnant atm in my opinion. maybe covid means ppl make crap music. maybe hardstyle is going strong and i dont even know caus i havent checked it out. but ye you can find good music of any genre on soundcloud. ive tried spotify and the playlists it curates are pretty boring so i stopped using spotify. maybe if i got more into spotify id find some good playlists. what other genres are there... phonk. phonk might last another 6 months and get boring. maybe dnb or hardstyle will make a comeback. orrr. some other genre. end rant again

guide on how to quickly start remixing a song:

• download or create vocal acapella of pop song with AI stem-splitting technology. also download the original full-mix normal wav file of the song.

• put both these audio files in your DAW, on top of each other in separate tracks.

• line them up so they're roughly in sync

• zoom in on a section where you can tell the waveforms look the same, line them up so theyre even more closely in sync. listen to both of them at the same time so that you know they are now in sync.

• look up the BPM and key of the song. google tells you this in the first or second result that comes up. set your DAW bpm to that bpm.

• look for something like a Kick-drum hit, or hihat hit or snare or whatever in the original version of the song's wav visual, move BOTH audio files at the same time (shift click in ableton to select both audio files, then left-click-hold and alt to finely move audio files left-right small amounts not locked-to-grid) so the hit is on the first beat of a 4 or 8 bar section.

• now you can delete the full mix original song... and you have just the vocal stem, on a DAW project with the correct BPM, with the vocal stem synced up so its hitting on the right millisecond of the right bar-number. to add your own drums and instruments. so you can save this DAW project as a template and then open it up whenever you want to try remix this song.... or whatever... this process can kind of suck if you're a noob but it gets easier.

btw, a lot of the sites that suggest what key a song is in.... they usually suggest whatever the major key is. so if a song is in G minor, the bpm/key sites will say that its in the key of A#. so you often might have to minus three semitones (A# down to G), to get the actual key of the song... sometimes the sites say the proper key though. 50% of the time its like this

if you want to remix a song not just with the vocal stem and you have e.g. the synths stem or guitar stem etc., the same ideas apply. line up multiple audio tracks with something like a kick-drum hit to get the audio file/s in sync with the BPM you looked up on google... so you need the original wav or the kick-drum stem wav (if you also have stems of the exact same length of other stems etc...)

you can figure out BPM yourself but its a pain in the ass. you can line up an acapella with no drums yourself but its pretty difficult, i think... much easier to use google for BPM and use kickdrum hit to line up any stems you want to use.

if you want to remix something thats not a pop song e.g. real-life band... i dont know. i dont bother doing this. im guessing most of the time, they didnt record with a click-track, so the BPM of the whole track would be all over the place, so you'd have to manually move small 8bar segments around and warp audio clips slightly to different lengths etc. i dont think this is really worth it. but im sure you could get really good at this and do it fairly quickly with a bit of practice... why not. might just take a lil bit longer than pasting stems in and lining them up once. but maybe people do record with clicktracks... dont know.

if you're completely new to this, i guess i forgot to mention: if you download a wav of a pop song, the song will i think never be 'in sync' with the bpm. because at some point in the process the audio gets compressed or something, and adds 50-100ms of time to the start of the song... or something like this... and then you don't know if dude who wrote the song started on the first bar anyway... so you need to learn this syncing stuff if you want to remix. theres probably better tutorials than this text comment. youtube probably has some good tutorials about how to get a remix set up.

forgot to show the FX. pretty much some (large..) amounts of Amp Overdrive and Saturation on everything, separate instances/settings for each track. reverb and delay on some of the percussion. the kick is sidechained to everything else. so everything ducks when the kick hits and the kick sounds louder (standard edm sidechain). usually i sidechain the snare as well. the snare is probably too low idk might need turning up. i just like super loud punch kicks.

the bass is a combo of 808 and brass stab with EQing and the above distortions mentioned. this might also need better EQing and turning up and different pattern. dont know. listened to this too much now

ive been keeping the 808 and brass stab patterns separate (the two channels with dark blue clips/pink channelcolor ones at very top)... this way i can have sometimes the 808 playing a low octave and brass stab playing 1 octave higher. or both playing lower octave. or both playing higher octave etc.... so it kind of allows some more flavor to the bass. but you need 808 and brass samples with really long tails... which isnt super common. so probably doing this kind of thing in serum would be better. like real sound design instead of samples. except its hard to sound design brass stabs and 808s that dont sound like shit so maybe just samples is better

i guess i would argue that remixing is not a crime... if its transformative enough, case-by-case basis. whether or not something is 'transformative enough' could be endlessly debated. and it probably will be endlessly debated bcaus theres so much intellectual property being made now and its so easy to transform digital media... but i guess i would go with... remixing is not a crime. i think some sort of revenue-splitting copyright-law-mumbo-jumbo type thing would be cool. probably unlikely to happen caus the big fish wouldn't want the revenue sharing to exist in the first place and sounds hard to implement and maintain anyway. but what do i know about copyright law. remixing is capital-ph PHun and its a good way to learn some music skills and make some music i guess