The short course “The Art of the Remix,” taught by Lorenzo Morresi and Mattia Del Moro, is a course on remixing with artificial intelligence designed for those who want to learn how to create a remix, starting from the raw material and working through to the finished, mixed, and mastered version. The process covers the entire music production workflow: from generating material using AI tools to breaking down tracks, from arranging to finalizing them in the studio.
Course content and structure
The course explores remixing as a practice that combines technology and craftsmanship, tracing the evolution of the discipline from vinyl records to artificial intelligence. Students work on both AI-generated material and existing pieces, learning to treat them as raw material to be cut, reconstructed, and reinterpreted.
- The first session is dedicated to analyzing the original track and the creation of the remix material, with AI serving as a co-creator. Students learn to generate source material not to use it as-is, but to deconstruct it: prompt engineering for musicians using tools like Suno to generate text-to-music based on specific styles, BPM, and references; generating separate stems, such as drum loops or bass lines; using AI tools in Logic X and Ableton Live to generate harmonic progressions and melodies in MIDI format for further manipulation.
- The second session focuses on decomposition and “modern sampling”: here, artificial intelligence meets the art of remixing. Students take the generated material—or an existing track to remix—and break it down using stem separation, with software such as Lalal.ai, RipX, or the built-in tools in FL Studio and Logic Pro to isolate just the vocal or drum track. The stems—whether generated by AI or extracted from the original track—are then imported into a DAW such as Ableton or Logic to be cut, pitched, and rearranged.
- The third session is the heart of the course: production, arrangement, and hybridization, where the track takes shape through a combination of human input and automated tools. We work on the structure of the remix, blending the vocals from the original track with AI-generated beats and basslines played or programmed by the student, incorporating both recorded and live-performed elements. Next, we address sound design and synthesis, either replacing or enhancing the AI-generated sounds: for example, a MIDI pattern generated by artificial intelligence can control a virtual analog synthesizer to add warmth to the sound.
- The fourth session is dedicated to finalizing, mixing, and mastering. A hands-on session on Logic X covers the main topics of mixing—equalization, compression, and distortion—while an introduction to tools like iZotope Ozone demonstrates how AI can analyze a track and suggest an equalization and compression curve, leaving the final decision to the human ear.
The course also includes a hands-on analysis session: Morresi and Del Moro open up their work sessions to demonstrate how they created two of their own remixes, “Che notte ragazzi” by Piero Umiliani (Lorenzo Morresi Remix) and “Mediterranea” by Giuni Russo (Dumar Remix), with an in-depth look at copyright issues related to remixing and licensing for samples.
The software used during the course includes Logic X, Ableton Live, and Suno.
