Release Date: December 1, 2021
Key: E Minor
BPM120
ELEVEN is the debut single from Starship Entertainment’s newest girl group, IVE. The song is a slow burner showing off influences from India and the Middle East during the verses and bridge before exploding into a higher tempo K-Pop dance section during the chorus.
For my interpretation of ELEVEN, I decided to play off the ethnic music the song gets inspiration from while also cranking up the energy a bit more with a dance music groove.
The hardest part about working on this song is the part where it slows down just before the chorus hits. I’ve heard many other remixers try to tackle this by doing one of the following:
a) Slow down the entire tempo of the song before going back to the original tempo
b) Speed up the tempo of that section to keep in time with whatever beat they created
c) Ignore the tempo change and bulldoze through even it makes no musical sense
Rather than do any of that, I decided to re-sample the instrumentation and use Ableton’s warp function to slow the section down without affecting the tempo of the entire song. It took a bit of work to get the timing right, but it resulted in something that didn’t adversely affect the piece as the whole for one technical issue.
Anyway, the final result of working around the oddities of this song is a version of ELEVEN that takes the unique flavours of the original and wraps it up in a different-sounding package.
