Senorita: Random House Project's tough love affair
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Gez Dewar, the man behind Random House Project, speaks about his new track and the challenges he faced to make ends meet...
1) Dear Gez, thank you for joining us again, here on the blog! I must say your remix of the song Senorita (by Justin Timberlake) is such a musical and tense "builder"! There's a war in there somewhere, and someone is clearly winning it, laughs! How on earth did you turn such a cool groove into this cosmic bomb?!
Ha! thanks Artur. This remix was a war for sure and I thought I had lost it... I did several versions before this one and could not get a vibe that I was happy with. I was really ready to put it aside and move on. Sometimes, it's best just to surrender because you're not "feeling" it. Sometimes you can totally burn yourself out on a single mix, and you need to step away and give yourself time to regroup and start again.
At one point, I felt I needed to go out and listen and dance. I ended up going to a great party called Faith run by Terry Farley and Stuart Patterson , headlining was Lil Louis and their sets blew me away and gave me permission to do what I finally ended up with for this rework. Sometimes less is more and structure is everything!
2) So the "tension" we feel in your version did not come from nowhere...
Yeah, in the beginning, I got a whole version all done and finished, but then, for a few days, I took some time to "live" with the track. I remember first hearing this expression when I sent a track to Juan Atkins when I was starting my career. He said to me he would "live with it" for a few days, and I didn't understand what he meant. It's a great expression, and it allows for a curing period.
So I spent the next few days listening over and over again to this first version, in the car, on headphones, out on walks, etc. And, as I moved away from the remixing process, I got on with my life, zoomed out and got a better perspective and just a gut feeling that something was not working. It wasn't what I was looking for, and, eventually, I ditched the whole version and started again from scratch, which is sometimes really hard as I was exhausted from hearing the track.
3) When listening to your version, we quite easily understand that you took a fragment of the initial song, transposed the tonality (redoing some of the instruments too if I'm not mistaken), and kept the whole thing into a steady and well-thought-out evolution. Can you share with us how you envisioned the structure of your version?
Great question. Sometimes I have an overall structure in mind, at other times the parts will dictate the structure, and it will evolve organically. Dance music is all about dynamics and energy levels and steering the crowd along that journey, which is what masters like Lil Louis are experts at.
This mix was about building slowly and changing subtly over time, which requires feeling your way through the track, replaying and replaying over and over again, and putting yourself on the dancefloor, and feeling what people feel. It's also about distilling the original parts down and identifying which bits best serve the new groove the strongest.
The musicality of the original is really something else and Chad Jackson's keyboard parts are genius-level, super-tricky Neo Soul/Jazz chords, which took a long time to work out. They were initially alluring but ultimately weren't right for the rework. Sometimes, it's really hard to let stuff like that go, but you can end up writing yourself into a corner, holding onto parts that won't serve the new work.
I ended up simplifying Chad's original chords just down to a couple, which had a great answer call feel and still worked over Justin's vocal. There are other, more subtle parts from the original, like the Horn lick, which is magnified and used repetitively in my rework (an old DJ Pierre trick).
4) You didn't keep a lot of Justin's vocals, laughs! I love how you used them as a rhythmic base; that's close to what an artist like Michael Jackson was doing live in his own productions. How do you identify snippets in a song, and how do you know they're going to really work out the right way?
Often the smallest samples can become the underlying hooks that connect all the sections of a rework together, especially on larger systems, where space is much more important, and not clogging the mix up with too many vocals is key. For this mix, I ended up discarding a ton of beautiful vocal hooks and stripped it down to parts which were supporting the groove. That tiny rhythmic vocal loop you mentioned (reminiscent of Michael Jackson's vocal style) really supported the groove, as did another adlib. Often, I will run the vocal over the new drum track and shift it around offbeat and stretch and pull it until something cool happens. You have to get the old way of hearing the vocals out of your head, and try to form a new relationship with the vocals to bring something fresh.
As you build the track, some ideas will stick, while often the more obvious bits will become annoying and eventually get ditched. Often, it's not until you start structuring that you realise what's working and what's not helping. This is why folks often get stuck in that terrible 8 Bar loop trap and never finish the structure, because the parts sound great in a loop but don't serve the overall track.
5) You're such a prolific remixer, and your productions are so great. What's coming next into our ears?
Thanks, yeah, it's kind of my therapy! I just love doing what I do, and love that folks really enjoy it too. I get the most pleasure seeing folks dance to my stuff, and it connects me to my community.
I have quite a few reworks in various stages of completion for the summer, an old Steve Silk Hurley tune, which I'm super excited about. Also, I have some remixes for the wonderful Vicious Charm Label and Kenneth Bager's Music for Dreams Label, which will be coming out soon.
Thank you so much Gez for this great chinwag!
Thank you again for the inspirational questions!
Comments