Years ago, a young boy was sitting on a couch with his grandparents watching a biography about a rather popular group. The boy sat through this approximately three hour long biographical film that talk about their lives and played just about each and every one of their greatest hits. For years to come, he continued to listen to these very songs everyday with his grandparents and when he was gifted his first MP3 player,  the first set of songs he added to it were from The Temptations.  You would think that he would get tired of these songs after a while, but he never did. You can now hear him humming the songs every now again as he heads to class or does anything productive. Who is this boy you ask? Well, you are reading a blog post from him right now!

This three star assignment required me to take some songs that I thought were the best of my favorite band or singer and create a mash up of those very songs. The mashup didn’t turn out that great, but I really enjoyed trying to making it sound okay. The songs that I used were, Get Ready, Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone, Ain’t Too Proud To Beg, (I Know) I’m Losing You, and Just My Imagination. My personal favorite of those five would have to be Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone because how the song tells a story for each of the vocalists and from their point of view.

To create this mashup, I used Audacity to edit the inserted songs. For a majority of it, I used the Time Shift tool to move around and reposition each song  to help them flow a bit better.

The final step before exporting the song,  I highlighted a section of a song and then went to the effect tab to make the end of the mashup fade out instead of abruptly ending.

That’s all the steps I made to create this project, so don’t let the three stars fool you. This assignment is easier than it looks, so hopefully you can follow my steps to create a mashup of your very own!

Assignment (3.5 stars)

For this assignment, I chose to mashup the songs Africa by Toto, and Calm Before the Storm by Darude. I chose these two songs because Calm Before the Storm is a techno song with only a few lyrics, very much unlike Africa. I thought that these two songs would make for an interesting collaboration, and my character Edward Creeper is a sucker for good music, so he was a big fan of this assignment. I had to turn down the audio somewhat in Calm Before the Storm so that the lyrics in Africa could be heard, but overall, I think this assignment went pretty well, even if the finished product doesn’t sound all that listenable.

To complete this assignment, I first downloaded these two songs into Audacity using a YouTube to MP3 converter. I then edited the songs’ lengths to make them match up, and tweaked the volume of each song. I assumed that SoundCloud would take this collaboration down for copyright issues, so I just uploaded it directly to WordPress. This was an interesting assignment, and was cool to hear how these songs work together.

I was pretty excited when I saw this assignment! I’m not going to lie, sometime’s I feel that a lot of these audio assignments are way over my head, whether it’s ability or creativity (usually creativity). However, if you’ve been following along with my posts, you’ll see that I’m heavily immersed in the dance world here at UMW! I have recently started choreographing (yay!) which means that I needed to familiarize myself in the world of cutting music! I’m a Mac user, so naturally I initially chose to use Garageband. I have recently downloaded Audacity, and I’m starting to learn it, but for now I’m still a Garageband girl! So I guess this whole rant was to explain the fact that I’m already pretty familiar with the world of cutting/mashing up music, so naturally I was excited to mash up two different songs for this assignment!

I knew that the first song I wanted to be slow and have a beat that flows. I thought a nice flowy song would pair well with a fun hip-hop/pop song with strong beats. I went through my iTunes library to find songs that I thought would mash well. I knew instantly that I wanted “Where Is the Love” by the Black Eyed Peas. I’m a huge fan of the beat, I think it’s really strong but simple. From here, I looked for a song with a very flowy beat that would complement it. This is where things got a little tricky. I went through several different songs, such as “Bubbly” by Colbie Caillat and “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis. Both of these songs presented a beat that was very nice, slow, and smooth, however the beats of “Where Is the Love” seemed to totally overpower it. As I scrolled through some more, I found an old favorite song, and I knew that “Follow Me” by Uncle Kracker had to be the one! It presented the flowy quality that I was looking for, however was not too soft that it would be overpowered.

After I chose my songs, I opened my Garageband and imported them both in. I decided that I wanted to start with the beginning of “Follow Me” to introduce a soft but steady beat. Where the song starts to pick up is where I overlaid “Where Is the Love”. I cut out the beginning of “Where Is the Love” so it came in right on a strong beat. I thought this would bring the beat up a bunch and give it more life. I kept the volume of each track the same, because I wanted “Where Is the Love” to slightly overpower “Follow Me”, but I didn’t not need to raise its volume because it is already a much louder song. Then, I faded out “Where Is the Love” because it is much longer than “Follow Me”. I faded it out during the chorus that matched up with the last chorus of “Follow Me”. Then, I had the last bit of the mashup just play “Follow Me”, just like the beginning. After I was done editing, I exported it to my iTunes and uploaded to my Soundcloud! I hope everyone enjoys it!