Eivind Sommersten - Miami Vice

16 other remixes of Miami Vice

I really had no intention of remixing this iconic tune. Martin Galway’s original is perfect in every way - in a retro-museum it could be an exhibit of it’s own, playing 24/7, and I felt like maybe it should be left in peace.

But I was thinking about how he made it, four notes playing in three voices with varying delays - and I was curious to see if I could replicate the effect in my DAW. This in fact turned out to be harder than I thought - to get the delay lengths and everything exactly right. And anyway it was just an experiment so I abandoned it for a while.

In other artforms, perhaps especially in painting and drawing, you are taught to paint what you see, not what you think you see - it occurred to me that the same principle could perhaps be applied in an attempt to recreate the riff(s) in Miami Vice. So I just started playing what I hear when I listen to Miami Vice instead of focusing on the technical or accurate aspects of it.

And before I knew it I had made so much progress (and was having so much fun with it) that I decided to finish it. It’s not necessarily exactly the same notes/effects as Galway’s original, but my contention here is that the music is still the same.

The original is three or four parts (it’s actually a little unclear to me), I tried to mimic the sound from those a bit but as the project progressed I strayed into my own subdivision of four parts. Also I introduced simple but pretty wide-ranging dynamics to the arrangement in order to change things up a little, it is not a copy after all, but rather a homage. A detail is also that the structure of a single part in the original is AABABCCCC, I shortened it to AABABCCC since the added dynamics made it a little overpowering during the climaxes.

The four parts are:

• Synth/piano/staccato strings (matches the filtered part 1 from the original)
• Flageolet acoustic/electric guitar/electric bass (matches the short unfiltered $51)
• Long/legato strings (similar to part 3 of the original)
• Funk/guitar (I added this just for fun 😊 )

Hope you enjoy - I sure did making it!