Very cool! The mashup is really catchy and the author did a great job mixing LMFAO and Psy.
The first mashup I remember listening to was the Eminem/Britney Spears mashup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j98zaF5592c). It was particularly funny because Eminem had recently dissed Britney Spears, but the ironic thing is that this mashup sounded better than the originals of both songs.
The only question I have is how do these mashup-er's isolate the vocals and instrumentals so clearly? Are the vocal and instrumental tracks available for most songs these days, so that fans can create mashups?
There are some neat tricks you can do with the 2 stereo signals. Linear combinatios of L/R channels is the easiest, but doesn't work well with modern mixes where bass/snare/voice is centered and other instruments are rarely ever hard-panned (you can get really cool results on some older albums like Rubber Soul - there's a lot of hard panning going on there)
If you find the right mix of David Bowie's Space Oddity (one with hard panning), playing one channel makes it sound like THE worst garageband Bowie cover ever.
The high hat is high on the mix, you can barely hear the orchestra, and only one of Bowie's audio tracks is on it, so it is really discordant.
One of the secrets is Rock Band et al. These games often have the original music remixed with isolated tracks for the various "instruments," vocals included. There are ways to set up a Rock Band session so the end result is just a single track playing in isolation, which can then be captured as source material for tools like Ableton.
Very cool mashup. Can you give more than technical details of how you made it? Logic Pro and then what? Or is there a site you recommend to explain how to make mashups? I always assumed it was something mere mortals can't do.
I prefer Logic Pro because it's (to me) the most straightforward, but you can use Ableton or Reason or whatever; all the DAW (digital audio workstation) apps are basically the same.
Of all the EDM I've tried to make - dubstep, drum/bass, house, trance, chillwave - mashups seem to be the easiest, because you start out with all the ingredients.
Find some instrumental tracks and a few a capellas. You'll want them to have similar keys, so they don't clash when you hear them (my mashup suffers from this in a few places), which can be tough, and pitch-shifting won't necessarily get you there. You also have to beat match everything, which means adjusting the tempos of the a capellas so they match your music track. Easiest way to do this is to find a BPM tapper and tap out the BPM for your song and your a capella, and plug those numbers into your DAW's tempo changer. If it's not perfect, you'll just have to slice the track during gaps so that major vocal cues land on specific beats.
After that, you just have to sequence everything together so it sounds good. In a mashup, this means making the lyrics and the music mesh well, and having hooks that throw your audience off guard. For example, in my mashup, my favorite part is the transition into the Offspring song because it just flows so well ("uno dos tres quatro cinco cinco seis" "let's go" "you know it's kind of...") and it's unexpected. Balance the lyrics so that one thing is being said/sung at a time.
Overall, just make it fun. A mashup is supposed to be a unique spin on other songs. Mix things up, and keep it interesting.
Agreed. The end of the Bloodhound Gang section is slightly discordant, but I felt that it had an interesting sound and lead well into the final section. Great work.
The Bloodhound Gang's chorus is probably the worst part of it, and is probably primarily what the OP was referring to, though the rapping verses work reasonably well. That said, it was still great overall.
Years ago, Acid (I forget who made it) used to have great features for beatmatching tracks and pitch shifting. It wasn't the best DAW by any means but it seemed to have been designed for making mashups.
Acid was pretty ground-breaking at the time it came out, I think a lot of beat-matching features in modern DAWs was inspired by what Acid did. It was made buy Sonic Foundry who then sold it to Sony - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/acidsoftware
I have an unusual amount of knowledge about Acid since a friend of mine originally created it (he left Sonic Foundry to work on audio software at Apple the last time I talked to him) and I used it to produce two albums back in the day.
For a lot of songs (and most popular new songs), you can download the "instrumental" version and the "acapella" version, the latter being the isolated vocal track. Most mashup-ers use these, as opposed to doing it themselves (which would lead to muddy/mismatched music).
The first mashup I remember listening to was the Eminem/Britney Spears mashup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j98zaF5592c). It was particularly funny because Eminem had recently dissed Britney Spears, but the ironic thing is that this mashup sounded better than the originals of both songs.
The only question I have is how do these mashup-er's isolate the vocals and instrumentals so clearly? Are the vocal and instrumental tracks available for most songs these days, so that fans can create mashups?