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Hi all,
I use DP9 to mix down my DJ sets. I'm ok at using the engineering aspect of the program but i haven't had a lot of experience in manipulating audio and MIDI and I am not a musician.

I want to try to do some remixes of individual songs, I am not sure where to start with this. As a production newbie I am seeking advice on the workflow how to do this?

For a start, I think I want this to be entirely a sampling task so would it be easier to start and finish this in Mach five?

Thank you in advance.

That's a tough question as it's outside the realm of what MOST of us on this forum do (which does not reflect on DP's appropriateness to the task; it's just that this is a relatively small forum that is made up mostly of Power Users).

My wild guess from what you have said though, is that you want to manipulate audio loops in particular; perhaps in a splice-and-dice way. And though MachFive is more advanced than Kontakt and other samplers when it comes to the more traditional tasks that the hardware samplers of yore (80's/90's era Akai, E-Mu and Yamaha rack samplers), it may be that the waveform editor window of DP is where you'll want to spend most of your time.

If you can afford it, buying slowly into the Celemony product line (Melodyne has several tiers that you can upgrade to a la carte as the need arises), may help you integrate the audio and MIDI workflow, as it does a fairly good job of converting audio to MIDI for editing tasks that might be too destructive of quality if done directly on the audio vs. re-rendering an edited MIDI file saved from Melodyne.

DP itself has some similar features to Melodyne, but someone else will have to instruct you on them as I rarely bother with them since I already own the highest-tier version of Melodyne.

MIDI editing in DP is quite powerful overall, but is spread across the app so you might need some pointers once you have more specific questions. The application started as MIDI-only "Performer" way way back, then added audio and became "Digital Performer", so it has long been known as one of the most powerful MIDI project tools in the industry.

I think that you want to start with the videos.
viewforum.php?f=27

Besides those, there are many on YouTube and at motu.com
http://motu.com/techsupport/resources

Don't feel that you need to watch everything, of course but the titles are generally descriptive enough. At some point, you're going to see a few that match up with what you want to do and how to get there. Since you already have some familiarity with DP, it shouldn't be to hard to narrow your focus.

Good afternoon:

If you're looking for a 'how-to' and workflows for Remixing, you may want to look at Mo Volans' Remix Essentials -- it's free in iBooks.

There is also a book in iBooks by a different author on Mashups.

This may give you a place to start in terms of how to approach a project and workflows. Then you can apply DP based on the tasks.

Best regards,

Rich

Bobby Oswinski's books are quite useful too, if mostly generalized vs. specific to any one DAW. They can seem a bit too basic for more advanced people, but I don't find them at all patronizing so they can be good for quick review or filling in missing areas of knowledge and experience.

I think these are now available on-line, in part or in full, but they're cheap anyway. But for DP in specific, I think all of the books are for much older editions by now, even though they are fairly good (such as the one from Berklee College of Music, and the one from Thompson Learning -- there's a third one that I can't recall from memory while at work).

Video tutorials are great, but not always practical as hands-on aids unless you have two dedicated screens or a 30" screen or larger.