One of the most difficult jobs you will face as a remixer is actually getting your first gig, because it's very much a chicken and egg situation: you need to get a showreel together to get a remix, but you need to get a remix (or a few) in order to get together your showreel. So if you are starting out and don't have a reputation to help you open doors, what can you do to take matters in your own hands and start the ball rolling?
In order to make a good, legitimate remix, you need what are called stems, or the individual musical parts that comprise a song—the drums, the vocals (or a cappella), the guitar or synth parts, etc. Unlike complete songs, these tend not to be widely available; records companies aren't in the habit of making these freely available to anybody, so you might have to resort to questionable practices (more on those in a minute) to get your start. But let's explore the “legitimate" possibilities first.
The Direct Approach
The most obvious and direct way to go about this is to simply figure out who you would like to remix, then approach the relevant person at the record label. Simple enough, right? It isn't actually that easy. Sure, finding out the record label is easy enough, and a moment of Googling or two should give you the contact information that you need. Once you have that, I would recommend actually giving them a call. That way, you will at least be talking to a real person.
But this is where you're likely to run into your first obstacle. Most record labels won't pass you through to “Ummm...the person responsible for commissioning remixes for [Artist X]." They usually want an actual name. And if you don't know it, it can be almost impossible to find out through conventional means.
In most cases, your best bet is to find out who manages the artist and ask them. I know this might sound equally unlikely, but in my experience you stand a better chance of trying to get hold of an artist's manager (or their agent or PR rep) than of finding out the name of a label's A&R person. In most cases, the manager can't give you permission to do remixes (or the stems needed to make one), but they can usually give you the right contact information at the label.
Once you finally get this person on the phone, what do you say if and when you finally manage to speak to them? I wish there was a line I could give you that was guaranteed to work, but the sad truth is that every A&R person will react differently to unsolicited calls like this. This is really where you need to bring your “A game" in terms of selling yourself. If this isn't really your strong point, then you will want to prepare answers to the questions you're likely to be asked. Confidence counts for a lot in this game, and if you can answer the following questions easily, it'll go a long way:
- What style of music do you produce?
- Who else have you remixed (and if “nobody" then why not)?
- Why do you want to do the remix anyway? (Given that, by the time you even hear about the track the promo will already be done or at least well on its way)
- Why should they trust you with the remix parts and how do they know that you won't simply upload them to the internet?
Unfortunately, even if you are offering your services for free, the A&R person in question will still want to be convinced that you are “safe" to give the parts out to. They want to protect the track (especially as most remixes are done prior to the release of a new single) and won't want the stems showing up on the internet days after they give them to you. And of course, the bigger artist/label you are going after, the more protective they are likely to be.
Through the Back Door
So if you don't have any luck with the direct approach, or if you simply don't feel confident enough to try it, what are the other options? There are a few possibilities, some more “legitimate" than others. The more legitimate, but far less flexible option, is to have a look on one of the many websites that now offer remix competitions of well-known artists' songs.
Indaba Music and Acid Planet, to name two of many, have competitions running right now for songs ranging from pop ("White Knuckles“ by OK Go) to classical ("2 x 5 Movement III: Fast“ by Steve Reich) to more expressly dance-oriented stuff ("Get My Way“ by Ciara Corr). Plus, sites like these have the obvious benefit of prizes, financial or otherwise, for the winners of these competitions. Even if you aren't interested in the actual competition as such, it's still a good place to go to for remix parts that you can use to build up a showreel. While these sites offer access to legit stems and opportunities, they're not always going to have the exact track that you want to remix. And if they don't, you'll have to resort to looking in more, shall we say, grey areas.
Finding full stems packages can be pretty hard—full packages can often be hundreds of megabytes in size, and more importantly, a large majority of remixes will only use the vocals from the original track (mixed a cappella or separate vocal tracks). But there are a lot of a cappella files to be found on the internet if you search hard enough. ACAPELLAS4U, for example, has a great number of pretty well known songs (some of them fairly recent).
I am not 100% sure of the legality of that site (as you'll see, it certainly doesn't look legitimate), but would a record label take legal action against you for using an a cappella that you obtained from such a site? It really depends on what you do with it. I'm not a lawyer, but I do know that if you are selling your remix, the answer would most likely be a resounding “HELL YES!" But if all you are doing with it is creating your own remix to use for showreel purposes, then I think legal action is pretty unlikely.
Summary
How ever you go about getting a cappellas to work with for remix purposes, or at least for showreel purposes, there will come a time when you get an “official" remix gig. And when you do, what's the policy on what you do with the remix stems that you get?
Even though I have very rarely been told explicitly that I shouldn't share them with anyone, it's pretty much an unwritten law that they don't leave your computer and that you certainly don't upload them for general consumption on the internet.
After all, if the stems get out in the open, the labels lose the ability to make a splash with their official remixes. On one occasion, the label was so concerned about leaks that they actually sent a representative from the label to sit in while we were doing the remix. At the end of each day, they would copy all the data from our computer onto a hard drive and then delete it from our computer. Then they'd copy it back on the next day for us to continue working!
Admittedly, that's quite an extreme example, but it just goes to show that labels take this quite seriously. And if you develop a reputation with A&R guys as a leaker, then none of the above methods will be of much help to you!
