Evilzug’s Odd Mashup-type Music!
Saturday, October 20, 2007
I’ve always loved playing around with audio, and have always wanted to ‘make music.’ My problem is that I’ve not played any instrument for longer then a year, and have forgotten how to read music, and then of course not wanted to deal with the pretty big learning curves of both learning a new piece of software, and then learning the actual music theory of electronic music.
In relation to this, I was introduced to the art of the Mash Up. It’s a kind of music who’s spiritual predecessor would be the 90’s ‘Megamix,’ where you mix a bunch of remixes into each other progressively, usually with the intention of rocking out. Mash-Ups are taking two songs and blending them together. Conceptually, or musically, or whatever. Like playing the vocals of one song over the melody of another. Or mixing up the bassline of one song, the melody of another, and then the vocals from a third. Then of course there’s always the more simple-concept ones, where you mash up a few songs in such a way that the lyrics or song titles make some kind of ironic statement.
An example of the last one that I’ve always wanted to make: Mash up the Destiny’s Child song “Bills, Bills, Bills” with the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women,” Particularly the parts where they sing “can you pay my telephone bills/can you pay my automo’bills,” and “Pay my own fun, oh and I pay my own bills/Always 50/50 in relationships”… Make sense?
Mashups appeared to be a way that I could make some semblance of music, be able to use my developed love and knowledge for music but also not be limited by my technical skills or lack of real applied music creation.
So a while ago I got my hands on this program called ACID Pro 4.0. It turns out that it’s an incredibly simple-to-use loop based sequencer that has some pretty cool features in it:
–It has a somewhat simple beat mapping process, where you can drop a song into it and then drag some bars around to measure out a measure. It then locks it up and lets you work with it on a beat-level. I.e. if you want four beats, you can drag it around and click off four beats easily.
–Once you’ve done this you can then speed it up and slow it down. This is helpful when you have two songs that are different bpm. You can just say ‘match this one to this one’ and since you’ve found the BPM already, it’s a piece of cake.
–It has a pretty simple and intuitive way to adjust volumes and add more tracks, so really it’s about as complicated as it needs to be.
So as an experiment, I set out to make some mash-ups of my own!
Like any good art experiment, I set out first by giving myself a limited palette of songs to choose from.
The inspiration of these was actually from the idea to mash up the Kitty Cat Dance song and Sandstorm by Da Rude. I couldn’t figure out how to do it well, so Oizys did it. I have to find the clip somewhere, of the ‘chorus’ part, which came out really well.
But one of the first ideas I had was that I felt that the sort of ‘woah’ part in Zombie Nation and Axel F go somewhat well together.
Then that lead me to chop up some clips from Kitty, my favorite song ever, and the best song from the Presidents of the United States of America.
Lastly I really like the Price is Right theme. It’s happy and skippy and awesome.
Axel F, Zombie Nation and a sprinkle of Kitty. I actually mashed up a ton of different versions of Axel F in this one, basically playing around with the concept of being able to keep different peoples interpretation of the melody between songs the same but moving around.
Evilzug - Axel Zombie Nation On My Foot
Zombie Nation, Kitty, and then I cheated a bit and used a bit from a Mashup by which had Eye of the Tiger mashed up with Skee Lo’s “I Wish”. I feel a bit guilty about it because it’s hard to credit but it’s in the spirit of the mash-up. I needed someone to say ‘hat’ so I could say “Kitty on a Hat” which is an inside joke. Lastly, sprinkle in some Meyows from the Kitty Cat song. By far my favorite of the three:
Evilzug - I Wish I Could Touch Da Rude Zombie Kitty On A Hat
Price is Right Theme, Axel F, and Zombie Nation
Evilzug - The Price Is Beverly Hills Zombie Zug of the Dead
So what did I learn?
–Many moments in these songs are too ‘layered’ I think for a casual listener. It’s fun for me to wade through all the layers of the songs and hear the parts I like, but letting people listen to them, some admitted that they were a bit too crazy at parts to really be taken seriously. Lesson learned.
–Also, the Price is Right has some fucked up time signature or something because it was really hard to find good points to loop it. It was a bit frustrating because I couldn’t find good loop segments but I managed to weasel one or two out and it made for some frolic-ish good times.
–Lastly, I don’t personally consider these anything I’m exceptionally proud of, or that they are amazing works that I’ll brag about for the rest of my life. They were fun as hell to make and pretty easy, relatively speaking, and I didn’t
Believe me, I have a LIST of mashups that I want to make. When I’m driving, for example, I currently cycle through a sort of “iPod shuffle” station that plays the most random music ever, a 60s-70s station, a rock station, and then some pop music station. Whenever I hear an intro to a song or some drum cadence or something that I think would go well with another song, I scribble it down, to save for a rainy day to sit down and make. when that day comes, I’ll probably spruce up this post and find it a permanent home on this site or evilzug.com.
Some teaser ideas:
Earth Wind and Fire: Shining Star vs. Katamari on the Rock - I actually started this one, but I just need to figure out the real body of the song. The gimmick is in place, but I need to figure out what I’m going to do for the 2 or whatever minutes I have time for.