MI CANCIÓN EDICIONES

I’m by no means “a producer” but I know enough basic (and I do mean basic) audio editing to be able to do small little edits of stuff on the fly. Here’s two recent examples of songs I liked but just though I could improve on a bit for my purposes (i.e. DJing).

Zambrano: La Cocona (Original)
La Cocona (Edit)
Originally from 7″

In the case of the Zambrano, the OG was perfectly fine for what it was but you compare with how the song opens to that unexpectedly funky bridge and I felt like they needed to get flipped so I copied the bridge, did a simple repeat of the first note to fill a bar and voila! I then waited until the song came back to the bridge and then faded it out from there. It ended up truncating the original by about half a minute but it seemed like the right way to bring everything full circle.

Johnny Sedes/Red Astaire: Feel the Carupano (Unity Edit)
Original “Carupano” from Mama Calunga (Fonseca, 1969)

I first heard Red Astaire’s “Feel the Horns Blow” about a year or so ago and was really taken with those incredible horns but it wasn’t until later that I realized they were sampled off a Fonseca LP (wouldn’t have guessed that) and not just any Fonseca album but straight up – one of the best Latin dance albums I have ever heard (and this is saying a lot). Sedes was a Venezuelan heavy hitter and Mama Calunga was an incredible achievement in terms of killer-no-filler Latin heat. Nothing else on the album quite approaches the ebullient energy of “Carupano” though and it’s easy to see how an interprid producer would fall in love with that brief but powerful horn break. To make the edit, I “shortened” the time it took to get the horn break but otherwise left the Sedes song intact until halfway through; there’s a natural break in the song where it seemed organic to return back to the horns (this doesn’t happen in the actual song though) so I spliced in the Red Astaire (and then shortened that so the two sides were balanced). I figured it’d make a good “bridge” song if I was going out of Latin and into some other genre with more quantizied beats. (One of these days, I might just write up Mama Calunga; it’s so deserving of more attention but alas, doesn’t seem to be on any reissue format).