Edmonton’s Poet Laureate, Rollie Pemberton, knows how to do a thing or two beyond expressing himself with rhyme and metre. Pemberton, aka rapper and producer Cadence Weapon, is a dab hand at the art and science of the remix.

“I like finding melodic cues in weird sounds and putting them together,” Mr. Weapon says. “I like the recontextualization of someone else’s music in the most direct way.” Rollie agreed to walk DRIVEN through the process of putting a new spin on someone else’s tune.

Track: “Sex with my Ex” by D.B. Buxton (from Cadence Weapon’s mixtape “Separation Anxiety,” which is available for download, in a name-your-price type deal, here.)

The original: a chugging, eccentric garage rock stomper with a UK mod feel.

After Cadence Weapon is through with it: a wigged-out dance track, complete with dubstep breakdowns and a rap cameo by Pemberton himself.

Step 1: Decide to do it.

“I get commissioned to do remixes; people will ask me to remix their upcoming single or whatever. Sometimes I will actively find people if I like a song enough.

[“Sex with my Ex”] is a project I took upon myself. I really like the original, so I emailed the dude, D.B. Buxton. He even said, before it came out, that I’ll want to remix it, and he was right.”

Step 2: Get the tracks.

“I like to ask for as many parts from the original song as possible. I’ll get all the drums, bass line, the vocals, the synth – everything separated, so I can kind of reconstruct it in my image. That’s the beauty of a remix: all the source material is totally okay for me to use.”

Step 3: Think it through.

“First, I always think of what my goal for that remix is. Usually I want to correct something I feel is wrong with the track, or I want to see how I could possibly improve on a track that I think’s good already.”

Step 4: Plan it out.

“I have a really specific plan when I’m doing a remix, I usually draft it out. There are some things that come out of experimenting and playing around with stuff, but usually I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to do.

“Sex with my Ex” is a pop song, so I wanted it to be kind of immediate. I liked a lot of the melodic elements, and wanted to keep a similar framework, but give it a different approach, affect it differently. Based on how fast it was, I figured I could do a bassline house/dubstep remix. I wanted to have different sections, and I definitely wanted to rap on it ¬– at the time I thought I could definitely comment on the subject…”

Step 4: Get down to the nitty gritty.

“After I build the skeleton of the beat and have the basic direction of where things are going, I start adding superfluous things like synth lines or a subtle drum drop out, making things more human, more organic that way.”

Step 5: Send it back and wait for the response.

“In the case of someone asking you to do a remix, they’re asking you to do what you do. But sometimes, people will be like, “Could you put the vocals louder?” – something minor. Sometimes people just hate the shit and don’t want it at all, but that’s part of the game.”