My entry for the #windowremixchallenge by Reason Studios.
100% Made in Reason DAW, no external samples. Reason Bass Instrument, S73 Electric Piano and SWAM Brass instruments and Mimic for a French House touch.

Lisa, Maja & Ryan - Window [Quarmat Remix] - Radio Edit

Reason Halloween Livestream’s remix challenge

Window (Popnapp Remix)

Lovely Memo

So on Friday 27th (October 2023), I came home in the afternoon from work to see Reason was holding a remix competition. I then realised that the closing date for submissions was that very day at 7 p.m. PST. I live in the UK, so the time difference was about 7 hours, give or take. I downloaded the remix stems and began to see if I could work with them. I found a beat I was working on with a friend a few years back that I had recently been revamping. The drums were running okay, but the melody we did didn't go with Lisa and Maja's vocals, key-wise. So I stripped away everything but the beat and the bass and tried other instances with different melodies. I am by no means a musician, nor do I claim to be one, but in the production game, I get by because I can play things by ear. Whereas a pianist will play with both hands to play the high, mid and low parts of a riff, I will do all three separately into layers in Reason.

At one point, I found a break from Cymatics of a piano, and it was working well. I began to add instrumentation to the chorus parts, and for the end, I added a lo-fi piano and strings. All the while, I'm being reminded that the break I was using was similar to one I had cut up 20 years prior. At that time, I had no idea what Reason was and did my production on my Akai MPC 2000. The break came from a CD called Buddhist Chants, and it was comprised of slow elevator-type music for doing yoga or meditation. So in the early 2000's, I sampled the break and made it into a crude beat that nothing ever came of, and it sat on my hard drive for years.

Before I got into using Reason (Reason 3 I think it was), I used Fruity Loops and placed the break in the archive folders. Upon looking into that very folder a few weeks ago, I found the break. So once again, I stripped away the Cymatics piano break. The sample fit well, but the only thing that was up was that the break was only 3 bars long. To compensate for that, I reversed the break and filled the gap to make it a 4-bar loop. I ran it in my favourite Reason effect, Audiomatic, and gave it the tape effect. Luckily, the instrumentation I added for the previous break still made sense. The only thing left to do was arrange the girls vocals in a way that I could write and add my vocals to.

Going from what Maja says in her talking stem, I devised lyrics based on that. It was like Ryan said in the interview on the live stream that every story has three sides: mine, yours, and the truth. Once I wrote and recorded the rap parts, I wrote and recorded a quick 4-bar ending sing-back, so to speak in Cubase (because my workflow for vocals is quicker). I added my own harmonies (Oh's and Ah's) subtly in the back, mixing well with what the girls did. I really wanted to do a version of the chorus as well, but I was unsure of the lyrics in the second part and didn't want to wing it. I bounced the audio down, added it to Reason, and used my VST's Soothe 2 and Transient Master.

I listened to it over and over again that night because, again, like Ryan said, I'm putting myself out there. I mean, it's not like I haven't put myself out there already all these years, but I know exactly what he meant. Transforming the song into more of a two-way conversation, which are the kind of remixes I grew up listening to. Are there things I would change? Yes, without a doubt, because of the time frame I had to make do. I never thought about the time difference, so when I finally uploaded it at about 9.30 p.m., I thought I had already missed it. But I have gotten into this mindset recently to just put it out because it does nothing on the hard drive. Never in my right mind did I think I'd be one of the winners. So on that note, I'd like to thank Ryan, Lisa, Maja and Reason Studios for the opportunity. I really did have fun making it, as did many of my fellow producers, and here's to the next one!

P.S. The cover is of me in Amsterdam (one of my favourite places) standing by the red light district windows.

Window (Remix)

Francesco Gabbrielli

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