Remixing David Bowie's "Starman"

In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works better to give them a starting point, some constraints, some raw material. In the Simple Remix project, you give students an acapella track (an unaccompanied vocal) and have them create new instrumental backings for it. One of my favorite songs for this purpose is David Bowie’s 1972 classic “Starman.”

by Ethan Hein

Reprinted with permission. See the full version of this article at The Ethan Hein Blog.

The song is nominally in F major, but the melody is ambiguous enough that you can effortlessly reharmonize it in all kinds of strange and interesting ways. Bowie’s vocal timbre also meshes very well with electronic production, and it sounds especially cool through effects like vocoder and Auto-Tune.

Vocoder and Auto-Tune examples

I have remixed the “Starman” acapella many times. Here are a few standouts:

David Bowie Remix examples

Here’s a guide to prepping the vocal stem for making these tracks in Ableton:

This week, I made a guest appearance in Dr. Megan Foley’s music tech class at The Polytechnic School in Pasadena, CA. I had sent them a specially prepared version of the “Starman” vocal that I put at a steady tempo so it would easily fit onto the DAW grid. The students set Bowie to everything from funk to EDM to Hans Zimmer style orchestration (Click here to listen to examples of student work from Ethan's visit to Dr. Foley's class!). One of them recreated the acapella using Vocaloid and ended up with something that sounded like the Katamari Damacy soundtrack. There were some creative vocal chops that resulted in intriguing alternative lyrics. The aforementioned Vocaloid version repeated the phrase “There’s a star” over different chords, which made a delightful hook unto itself.

Here is the beautiful thing about the Simple Remix project. One of Megan’s students asked me, “Where do I go from here?” The answer is, just remove David Bowie’s vocal out of your track, and voila, you have a banging original instrumental. Then find yourself a singer-songwriter and work together to come up with a new melody and lyrics. This is much easier than writing a song from scratch!

Let’s dig into the specific qualities of “Starman” that make it such a reliable source of inspiration. It is quite a weird song, even by

This is a lot of formal surprises to pack into the first minute and a half of a song! Rock is usually hypermetrically predictable. This includes most David Bowie songs. If you listen to “Ziggy Stardust” or “Moonage Daydream,” the hypermeter stays consistent and predictable, with symmetrical sections that are four or eight bars or twelve bars long.

The eccentric form of “Starman” combines with its unconventional chords to create a melody that is only loosely anchored to its original context. The verse melody doesn’t start or end in a way that clearly indicates the key of F. It sounds just as good over grooves in G minor or D minor or C Mixolydian or A Phrygian. Once you have primed the listener to expect one of these other modes, the chorus can plausibly fit into it too. The ending groove starts and ends on A, which makes it especially conducive to reharmonizing as D minor or A Phrygian. The odd phrase lengths can be a challenge if you want to create a predictable dance groove, and I have regularized the form a bit in my remixes.

Here’s a look at the process of making one of my “Starman” remixes:

I don’t feel like I am anywhere close to exhausting the possibilities of this tune. I’m looking forward to hearing what future classes do with it too.

Ethan Hein is a Doctoral Fellow in music education at New York University, and an adjunct professor of music technology at NYU and Montclair State University. As a founding member of the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, Ethan has taken a leadership role in the development of online tools for music learning and expression, most notably the Groove Pizza. Together with Will Kuhn, he is the co-author of Electronic Music School: Empowering Student Creativity with Ableton Live, coming in May from Oxford University Press.

Visit The Ethan Hein Blog for information, resources, and projects for making music with technology.