You may wonder why I broke the capitalization habit and POSTED THE SUBJECT IN ALL CAPS. Well, it’s because I’m excited. I found this assignment and, while it doesn’t have to do with radio, it’s a challenging one. I write this preamble before beginning so as to chronicle this journey. The purpose of this assignment is to take a song that has been redone and to overlay it with its original, with the result being (hopefully) a blend of old and new as well as the overlaid voices of two singers in time. The excitement comes from recently being shown a song, an album really, of covers and in knowing which song I’ll be working with. An album was recently released entitled Rock Sound Presents: The Black Parade, on which bands have covered My Chemical Romance songs in celebration of 10th anniversary of the release of The Black Parade. While MCR wasn’t always my flavor of music, a friend showed me both the original and the cover of Cancer, and I think they’re pretty gorgeous together. Without further ado, let’s begin.
Link to Assignment: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/mixing-songs-like-batter/
Stars: 4
Process: First, I’ll be grabbing the mp3s of both songs. Then, to no one’s surprise, to Audition I go.
Well, that was extreme. Within the first minute or so, I came to the realization that fully mixing these songs without a controller would take an extraordinarily long time. This is primarily due to the 21 Pilots version featuring reverb combined with repetition at a different tempo. While it’s still a strong desire, it’s a completed project for another day. That said, the first minute is complete. I will do my best to go into the process while translating it into plain English. First came the partitioning of the song. I decided to take the first minute, as that seemed to blend decently well naturally and didn’t drown out the vocals too much with the heavy instrumental style of both artists. The first minute immediately required cropping a bit of the 21 Pilots intro to bring the vocals into remote alignment. It was at this point that I exported the selected time block to a new multitrack file. After this, an iterative process ensued. This consisted of rapidly cutting sections of the 21 Pilots track to bring them into alignment, followed by fading the MCR track in different ways and testing the sound after each iteration. For the final version, I had to cut some of the MCR track to bring it to alignment. With the pieces cut and a gap in the middle, the ending (where I decided I wanted to stress the synchronization) was out of time. To fix this, I cross-faded the blocks of MCR’s track into one another and faded the first block (on the extended word ‘you’) dramatically, so as to keep the half-syllables on different words from rolling into one another. To align the notes after the lyrics had ended, I shortened the 21 Pilots track and faded the end, while cropping the MCR track to end on a solid piano note being played. Towards the end, I panned each track, one left and one right.
That wall of process text posted, here’s the result. Because of the drastic panning (15), this sounds better in stereo headphones. Despite the difficulty, I quite like this type of assignment. I will probably be doing this again (and potentially posting it) with other songs that have been redone.
