�I been in this game for years, it made me an animal
It's rules to this shit, I wrote me a manual
A step-by-step booklet for you to get
your game on track, not your wig pushed back�

-Ten Crack Commandments, Notorious BIG

These are some basic rules that I produce by. You may choose to include all, one or none of these principles into your own production. Class, get your pens and pads out and be ready to listen.

Make your tempo match up to the vocals
You want people to bob their heads. Unless they're Zaphod Beeblebrox, your listeners are going to get lost when your tune gets out of sync with itself. Keep the experimental stuff for the experimental loving kids. Be careful if you do try going down the route of �experimental' music. Don't try it in your father's studio, only under Stockhausen's supervision, alright? I try to make all of my remixes work alongside the vocals and not against them. Match up the beats, vocals and bass so they work with one another and not against.

You're doing a remix. You don't have to use the whole vocal track. You don't have to use any part of the original mix. You don't even have to use their chorus/hook of the song. You don't even have to use their tempo (although I think the Beasties like having their vocals at their recorded bpm). In the dance music remix world, the farther away your tune is from the original the better. Keep this in mind and try to make the track yours.

I bet even ian c rogers wasn't able to pick up on all of the samples used in Paul's Boutique. One of the best sources of fun is to be listening to the radio or watching music television and hearing a sample used by the Beasties. I'm a freak when I find the source to a sound used by a tune. Recently I picked up a record at a thrift store I thought would be cool. I listened to the whole thing before finding a clean sample that was used by Public Enemy and Biggie. Think of the double joy you'll give someone that listens to your track. First they'll hopefully dig your fresh sample and two they'll go �that's where that guy got that sample from!� if they come across it later. I used a clip of the dad from the internet underground hit �Tokyo Breakfast� in my remix of Shake Your Rump. Try to get samples from places people might not have heard from. �Just to watch him die� was the first thing I ever heard from Johnny Cash. It was only checking out where samples came from have I been able to enjoy some of the man in black. Dig deep into that sample crate and pull something out that will make people dig your tune even more later on.

Some stuff is played out. I've learned from my musical sensei that you can either do something FIRST or you do something BEST. As you know, the Star Wars movies are very popular and have been sampled many times. There is a Tampa jungle producer who used (not very well) some droid dialogue from Star Wars. I felt it detracted from any worth of the tune the samples were used in. If you do use something very obvious (like The Jeffersons theme song in the Alive remix) try to use it as best as you can. If you do use something hugely obvious, TWEAK IT. An example of this is using The Winston's �Amen Brother� beat. Some have taken to using this beat and making an art out of its re-sequencing and metamorphosis.

The So Watcha Want remix has a sample of the Inspector Gadget theme song. You'll never know it because of some audio slight-of-hand. If you do want to use something obvious, try to make it less obvious. It's more fun for your listener to figure out the sound and it makes the final product more original and more yours. Use of some those crazy menu options in CoolEdit or SoundForge or whatever you're using. You might make things sound even better than if you used the sample clean. Tweaking loops and samples will also get you more mileage out of it. In my Alive remix I have the same damn wah-wah guitar loop going through the whole song. Hopefully nobody gets tired of the sound because of the pitching up and down and not using that whole loops continuously.

Don't steal huge chunks of another's work.
You're a remixer, not a mixer. A DJ most simply gets two songs working with another. That's not my mission on a remix. My mission is to take some different things and put them together as seamlessly as possible. The Dust Brothers went the extra mile and so should you. They went all over the place. I think that when you rip large amounts of another's work it cheapens your own. Bring some different parts together and see what you come up with. I initially felt bad about the straight-up theft of the Trading Spaces theme song, but since I felt I was doing it first, I could take a shot at it.

There's lots of beats in this world� why just use one in your remix? Even if you only choose to use one �source' beat, why not chop it up and bring it back together? This will give you a second beat using the same sounds as the first and makes going between the two beats seamless. Try mixing the kicks of one beat with the snare and additional percussion of another. In my So Watcha Want remix, the junglistic beats change up constantly. When you're doing a drum-n-bass remix you basically only have the drums and bass to work with. Go for the gusto and change stuff up! Go crazy and play it back. You'll see what works and what doesn't work. I remember working on beats using Fruity Loops years ago. I would do a dozen different beats and run them against the song. I would listen over and over and delete the ones that were wack. Like I said, go crazy and see what works. I think my Alive remix uses at least four different drum loop sources.

I am a very happy and proud owner of a Korg MS2000. It's a �virtual analog' synth. This is when a piece of equipment simulates one of those classic analog synths of the 70s. This one even does vocoding. It's got tons of knobs to touch and tweak the sounds that come out of this thing. I produce and sequence totally on the computer currently but try to make every remix have at least one element of the MS2000. If you're lucky enough, bring something from the outside into your computer. Even if it's ripping a beat from your old Casio cheese-keyboard, DO IT! Anything that makes noise, try plugging it into your computer and sampling it! If it doesn't have an output jack, use your microphone and record it somehow.

Listen to your stuff on headphones, computer speakers, car speakers, boomboxes. You might find that certain things just don't seem right playing back sometimes. Go back into the studio and work on your mix. Maybe you can bring down the bass or some some EQing to make something less muddy. Maybe you need more bass and it takes your friend's sub to tell you so. Are your drums too �dry'? Maybe you need to add some reverb to them and then make them less in the mix. Keep at it.

When you release this song to the world, make sure this is the FINAL mix. Play it for some limited peeps to make sure that it has gone as far as it can go. What you're looking for is being able to re-listen to the track 5 years from now and still make yourself say �yeeeaahh, that's da joint, that's the jam�. Try to impress yourself years from now by getting things right tonight. Also, you're going to need to encode your song into an MP3.
I suggest encoding your material with at least 128Kbps, maybe even with a VBR. Also in the file name it's a good idea to mention your name, the people you are remixing, the name of the song and if you want, the name of your mix

(example: BobJonesvsStinkyCheeseAssassins(HolyCowMix).mp3)

You're also going to want to fill out the title/artist/song name/etc information for the mp3 when you encode it. By doing this its easier for people to know what they're looking at when they see the file sitting there and to feed your info to the mp3 player so it can display accurate/good information instead of nothing because you left it blank.

And to flip the script on this entire work� remember that rules were meant to be broken!

Links:
Funky49.com
AcidPlanet.com