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mixtapemessiah asked: (As I listen to Jesus Christ Walks for the millionth time) and more Brand New besides Optimist Yeah? Can you maybe do Anthony Green, Gaslight Anthem, Taking Back Sunday, or something of the sort in a mashup. Thanks
I’ve exhausted my Brand New resources, I don’t think I’ll do any more unless some new acapellas/instrumentals surface.
Never listened to Anthony Green, but I did make about $100 flipping Circa Survive records, so maybe I owe them some kind of reparations.
I find The Gaslight Anthem insufferably boring, so it’s unlikely I’d touch anything they did, sorry.
I’ve got something cool with Taking Back Sunday in the can, I’ll post it in the near future just 4 u.
Anonymous asked: Where have you disappeared to?
I been in the lab wit a pen and a pad tryna get this damn label off
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@girltalk tweet: “My shoes and plastic wrapped laptop in the rock+roll hall of fame”
YES
I was listening to the Girl Talk Live at Binghamton bootleg as this came up in my feed. This man is a master, somehow manages to still be considered overrated by some despite being a skilled arranger live and on record, with a great ear for song selection.
twikki asked: Averagely. How do you go about making mash-ups? Do you find the acapellas yourself or invert the instrumental ?
I listen to a lot of music. When I hear a riff/melody/progression that reminds me of another song, I see if it works. Usually it doesn’t, so I try something else. I have a moderately large-sized database of multitracks at my disposal, so I have a lot to choose from. I’m keeping my sources close to the vest, but suffice it to say there are some smart people who have reverse engineered some popular rhythm-based video games, and I’ve been fortunate enough to obtain some of the resulting files. Also, most great pop singles of the 80s (like Wham!) have instrumentals on the B side of the 12”, and a lot of modern pop songs have instrumentals/acapellas on the CD single. Or with creative editing, you can make your own instrumental sometimes.
IMO, phase inversion is garbage. You need two identically mastered, lossless, perfectly in-phase versions of the song to get anything usable, and the result usually still sounds like an alien walkie-talkie being dropped down a sewer pipe. I’ve heard maybe 10 good sounding phase-inverted acapellas out of hundreds downloaded. Which is a shame, I’ve got so many potential mates for Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You” but every DIY acapella has artifacts of the background vocals which clash keys with almost everything.
Anonymous asked: I was wondering, what are you trying to get across in your mashups? Anything in particular or are you just having fun? (I am not trying to sound condescending, I am just curious about the mind behind the mashups)
Whoa. Getting deep here.
I discovered mashups in high school through Limewire. I heard artists like Go Home Productions, ToToM, and Party Ben, and I was really attracted to the cognitive dissonance of hearing 2 disparate styles of music being smashed together in such a natural sounding way that highlighted the unlikely similarities in, say, Johnny Cash & The Beastie Boys. Soon, I started piecing together my own mashups in Audacity, which is a bit like doing photo retouching in MS Paint. I’ve since upgraded to Ableton Live, which is the single best DAW for sample manipulation that I know of.
As for the why? I guess I’ve always been fascinated with audio engineering, as well as intellectual property law, and this is a fun way to combine the two. It’s a good production skills exercise, since all I usually have is an instrumental and a vocal track to work with. Mostly though, I like any form of recontextualization, and this is the format I happen to be good at.
UHHHHHHHHH