How to Create Latin Afro House Remixes: From Stem Splitting to Full Production

In this tutorial, Niek walks through the complete process of creating a Latin Afro House remix - from splitting stems with a free AI model to building a full arrangement with drums, percussion, and chords. You will learn how to extract vocals and harmonics from an existing track and rework them into a groovy, percussive Latin Afro production.

What Is Stem Splitting and Why Does It Matter for Remixes?

Stem splitting is the process of separating a full track into its individual components - typically vocals and instrumentals. For remix production, stem quality makes or breaks the project. In this tutorial, the recommended tool is MVP MDX23 Collab Fork, a free stem-splitting model that runs inside Google Colab. Compared to the built-in stem splitter in Ableton or FL Studio, this model produces noticeably cleaner results - especially for vocal extraction, where it preserves the full vocal with minimal phase artifacts and even handles backing vocals with impressive accuracy. You connect your Google Drive, run the installation, and execute the model directly. No prior technical knowledge is required. The quality difference is significant enough that everyone who has tried it has switched immediately.

How Do You Extract Chords and a Bassline from an Instrumental?

Once you have the instrumental stem, the next step is converting it to MIDI so you can use the chords and bassline in your own project. There are many online tools for converting audio to MIDI, but the built-in Ableton feature works best here. The process is straightforward:

1. Drag the instrumental audio clip into Ableton
2. Right-click the clip and select "Convert Harmony to New MIDI Track"
3. Clean up any stray high-frequency notes that the algorithm picked up incorrectly
4. Quantize the remaining MIDI notes to lock them to the grid
5. Export the MIDI clip and import it into FL Studio or your DAW of choice

The result is a clean chord progression that closely follows the original harmony. The chord extraction in this case picked up the chords accurately enough to use directly after light cleanup.

How to Build the Chords and Bass for a Latin Afro House Track

With the MIDI chords extracted, load them into a piano plugin. In this tutorial, Arturia Piano V3 is used with a jazz upright clean preset. Reducing the brightness slightly rolls off some of the high frequencies, giving the piano a warmer and less brittle feel. A Rhodes layer is added alongside the piano - a combination you hear often in this style. For the bass, simply copy the lowest note of each chord into a dedicated bass preset. The bass used here is called "Bass Depth" from the Tantra pack - it uses an Uno wavetable pitched down two octaves, with a custom wavetable for extra width and a touch of distortion in the high end. The result is a subie, fat bass tone that sits well in the low end. Sidechain compression is applied to pump the bass against the kick.

How to Build Latin Afro Percussion Layers

Percussion is the core of the Latin Afro House feel. The layers in this tutorial build up progressively:

• Tom sequence - an 808-style tom playing quite high, combined with an analog BD sine, running on a single note in the key of E to lock in the Afro groove
• Congas - full-sounding congas that cover the whole frequency spectrum with the low end removed, contributing to the Latin poppy energy
• Acoustic hat loop - layered with a big sounding tom to add drive and power to the drop
• Organic percussion loops, claves, shaker loops, and texture loops to fill up the full drop

The congas in particular are key to making this feel Latin rather than purely Afro. Glide notes on the bass - one octave up from the root - add extra energy between phrases.

How to Arrange a Latin Afro House Remix

Good arrangement in this style means treating the original material as a toolkit rather than a template. The approach here starts with ambience - atmospheric pads in key plus a natural bird ambience - before introducing the main elements. The conga loop runs from the very first bar to establish groove immediately. Chords and bass enter gradually, followed by the vocal. One technique worth noting: the big sounding toms and acoustic hat loop are slightly filtered in the first drop and then open up fully in the second drop. This filter automation gives you a tool to shift energy between sections without changing the elements themselves. The buildup reintroduces the original instrumental briefly, but the drop itself relies entirely on the reconstructed elements - the vocal alone fills a lot of space and keeps the production clean.

What Makes Latin Afro House Different from Regular Afro House?

Latin Afro House combines the organic percussion and deep groove of Afro House with brighter, more poppy melodic ideas borrowed from Latin pop and reggaeton-adjacent sounds. The key elements that distinguish this style are:

• Congas and claves that lean into Latin rhythmic traditions
• Chord progressions that favor emotional, pop-friendly harmonies rather than purely African modal ideas
• A vocal style that is melodic and hook-driven, often in Spanish or Portuguese
• A BPM that sits in the accessible house range rather than slower deep house territory
• Rhodes and acoustic piano textures layered together for warmth

The combination makes the style appealing to broad audiences while keeping the organic, groove-focused DNA of Afro House intact.

How to Use the Tantra Pack for This Style

All of the sounds in this tutorial come from the Tantra pack, which includes loops, presets, vocals, and more designed specifically for this genre. The bass preset "Bass Depth" is used for the subie filtered bassline. The tom sequence and conga loops come directly from the pack's percussion section. If you want to recreate this style quickly, having genre-specific samples and presets removes the guesswork around what frequencies and textures work in Latin Afro House. The pack is built around the production techniques shown in this video, making it a direct companion to this workflow.

If you want to go deeper into this style, download the full project file linked in the video description. It includes all the stems, MIDI, and samples so you can examine every layer in detail. Try running the MVP MDX23 Collab Fork on your own source material to see how well it separates the vocals - most producers who try it switch immediately. And if you have questions about the workflow or want to suggest future tutorial topics, drop a comment on the YouTube video.

Tutorial by Niek, co-founder of The Producer School. For more production tutorials, subscribe to The Producer School on YouTube (280K+ subscribers).