Very rarely...and I mean very rarely..you find a track with acapella's on the single. Or parts with words and very little to no music behind them. With those, you could find another song without words or whatever(or make a song on the computer and feed it into one channel on the mixer) and then mix them and that could be called a remix.

But that's only vocal songs.

There's also weird stuff you can do...with two of the same record for example. But you can't do anything really major, and if you do it it would be using another song. It'd be really hard to do enough to a track to have it be as different that the professional remixes are. professional remixes are done in the studio or on a computer.

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-Jon
www.DJjoncaserta.com - - mixes and whatnot (melodic progressive house and trance)

MOst people these days, including big name remixers, use a computer to do it. I would guess that this is largely due to the fact that alot of tracks being remixed are doen by unknown producers, and as i said before, the record label wants to put a name on it.

'Back in the day' people did all their producing with dedicated equipment like samplers, seqencers and a keyboard, or units like the Roland TD-303. There are some purists out there that still prefer to do things this way (notably fatboy slim), but theyre a dying breed.

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Lets FUCK! I wanna rock your body rock.

Hardware is still used massively. The difference lies mainly in the sequencer. Before it was mainly dedicated hardware, now with computers sequencing gets more versatile.

But that doesn't mean that everything is done with computers. Very few pro studios/producers use an all software package nowadays. Most of the time it's a main computer for sequencing and recording, but the actual sound generators are still hardware (and sometimes some softsynths/samplers are added).
Much is still done with hardware synths, samplers and a keyboard, it's just the thing that controls all that is replaced by a computer.

Why not all software? Software sound generators have only gotten public attention the last couple of years because computers are getting powerful enough. Don't forget a synth like the Virus C, to name one of the most famous, is stuffed with dedicated DSP's that are only doing what they are designed for.
A computer has several more levels : it has to control more peripherals, keep the OS running at all time, ...

If you have to make a very complicated sound, a hardware synth will do it without a hassle. If you do it with a computer, you'll bring it to its knees pretty quick.