Song Mash-Up Assignment Worth 3 1/2 stars

For my last audio assignment I had to mash up two distinct songs.  I thought what better place to start then children’s nursery rhymes and songs.  So I picked the most up beat song which was

London Bridge is Falling Down (original song)

The song above war originally too slow and I needed it to match the techno song “Satisfaction,” by the techno artist Benny Benassi.

I retrieved both songs from MP3 skull by doing a search.

Editing Process:

For both of these songs I had to do some editing.  First I shortened the MP3 download for “Satisfaction,” because London bridge rhyme is nothing but repetitive language and lyrics as is the techno beat that I choose.    In addition, the original London Bridge song I downloaded was too slow and too folksy sounding so to make it funky, I sped up the speed of the song in Audacity editing software to give it a chipmunk like sound to it and to match the techno music. Thus resulting in London Bridge – Techno Version.

Mash-ups tend me to my favorite assignments. For example, my second audio assignment for this week is “Music Mash-up”. What we had to do for this assignment was taking two distinct types of music and mashing them up together. I fear that my mashup was a bit cliché but whatever, it’s hilarious. Let me take you through the process!

Songs

Deciding which two songs to pick was definitely the hardest. Picking two different styles of music is really easy, trust me. You could clash rock and country, rap and county, and so on. It was important to pick two very different styles of music but also from two different time periods. I enjoyed the whole idea of music connecting together no matter when it was made. So i wanted to start with a classical song. I’m not very hip with classical music so i searched the one man i do know about: Mozart. I mean, we’re forced to learn about him in elementary school, yeah? So i did a random google search ad the first one of pieces to pop out was “symphony 40″ so boom. I chose it! Now, what’s very different from classical music and also very popular and recent? Jay-Z of course! Now, i do not listen to much rap. Rarely.. I don’t know anything about it except that the young kids love it. The only song i do know by Jay-Z is “99 Problems”. If you don’t know this song, well, look it up. It’s a true “classic”. So now that i have these two very distinct, very popular songs, let’s mash them together!

Mashing

I already knew how to upload songs from Itunes to Audacity, so that was a breeze. I converted the MP3 files to AIFF and put them into Audacity. I then chose the right length of Mozart’s symphony 40 because it’s so long and matched it up with Jay-Z. Boom. Final step: Making it into one file. I tried literally moving Jay-Z’s song into Mozart’s song but it wouldn’t jive. I was desperate and good friend YouTube helped me out. I straight up search “Merging tracks in Audacity” and this lovely clip came up. Sadly, the man’s first method of mixing songs didn’t work so i tried the second one. YAY! They merged and i exported the file to my computer. Now, I uploaded it perfectly to Soundcloud and life was good! So here is my final product! I think it’s pretty catchy and everyone should enjoy it!

Symphony 40 & 99 Problems:

Stars:3.5

My first Audio assignment consisted of mashing two distinct songs in to one track, a . I used two popular songs from different genres; one being R & B and the other Hip Hop. The track Bad by Wale uses a lighter version sound featured in Trillville’s hit Some Cut so I thought they would blend well together. The end result can be heard here

I used audacity to import the two featured songs which I had previously uploaded to a music file. I then isolated the beginning and ending portions of “Some Cut” and faded the ending sounds of those portions to first allow the beginning of “Bad” to begin. The second sound portion of “Some Cut” I faded out as the end of “Bad”; a new version to it’s original ending!

Hi there! This assignment was the Music Mashup (3 1/2 stars), where I took two completely separate songs and put them together. I decided to take Adele’s Rolling in the Deep and Imagine Dragons’ It’s time and put them together. I took the vocals to Rolling in the Deep and the instrumental to It’s Time.  And I have to say I had fun with the process but I also think it was a complete fail. I just couldn’t get them to line up so that it sounded decent. I first used the songs beause the both had the same tempo of 105 beats per minute (bpm). I discovered this because this website, the Music Database has a list of all songs and you can find which ones have the same bpm. Bothe the songs were in that same field. So I decided to put those together and see how it came out. For the most part the song sounds fine together but at some point they just don’t match up very well. It just seems like its too much. So overall this just didn’t work out.

Although it didn’t really work out I did learn a lot about audacity! While putting the songs together I experimented with the volume of the separate tracks. I played around with each one until I felt like there was a good balance with the two of them. I also trimmed the beginning to each song so they would start at the same time. I also used a fade in and a fade out so it wouldn’t just end abruptly. Before I decided which songs I was going to use I also experimented with the different pace, tempos, pitch, speed. I am still working with those to see if there is a better way to match up the songs.

Anyway, I hope this isn’t too bad and it doesn’t hurt the ears too much! Enjoy!

This assignment was to take 2 songs and mash them together using audacity. Here are the two songs I chose:

I converted the YouTube Videos in YouTube to MP3 Converter and opened the filed in Audacity.

House songs are generally pretty easy to mash together so that’s why I picked these 2. I added some effects throughout the songs. In the beginning I delayed the second song a bit. Also No Beef speeds up about 30 seconds in so I had to slow it down a but to match Teenage Crime. I also added several fades to both songs.

Here is what it looks like in Audacity:

And this is what it sounds like (Due to copyright issues, I cannot upload this to soundhoud):

So I can’t get this to upload to Sounndcloud right now, and I’m not sure why (I’m hoping it is just taking a while and will show up later).

This is the Music Mashup that I made for an assignment this week. I decided to use two very different sounding songs, that both talked about Rock and Roll. I used Bill Haley and His Comets’ “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock”, and Fall Out Boy’s “Save Rock and Roll.” I really love both of these songs, even though they are so different. I honestly had a much different idea going into this, but I really couldn’t figure out how to do it on audacity. I wanted to have the Fall Out Boy lyrics over the Bill Haley music, but it wouldn’t work, so I did it this way instead. For my first attempt at music mixing, I’m going to tell myself that this isn’t that bad, but I really hope I get better at this as we go, so not all of my assignments are this weird.

Using audacity, I imported the songs from my itunes library, and then trimmed away the pieces I didn’t want, lined up the other parts, and adjusted tempo and volume a little.

This remix project was in  accordance to DS106 audio assignment Music Mashup, which asked us to create an audio mashup aka a remix of two songs. I didn’t used Audacity as the assignment asked, but that is because I didn’t have to used Audacity.

Instead I used Mixxx which a free DJ Software. I have used previous DJ software such as Virtual DJ (which I’m certain many people I know used already,  Serato and Taktor. What was such a bother about these program besides the obvious cost, was that they were never easy to use up front, seemed intimidating and there was always some underlying catch if you really wanted to practice some pro work. Serato for example, its program being free but the hardware to go with it costing more than the most computer did. That is for another forum however.

I chose to use the below audio clips :

The instrumental is from the the Trey Songz single Na Na produced by DJ Mustard. While the A capella I found is from Beyonce’s single Naughty Girl.

From the beginning when I chose to do this project I decided it would be best to use songs which were close in bpms (beats per minute). This was so that the manipulation of the songs wouldn’t differ greatly and sound over edited from the original version. Those are problems which I encountered before trying to match a slow song with an instrumental that was much much faster or slower than that acapella was.

I am new to Mixxx and decided to find a tutorial on YouTube, after I downloaded the program and began to play with it for a bit. This clip over viewed using the cross-fader, the pitch bar which not only increases or decreases the pitch but also alters the bpms correspondingly so the higher the pitch the higher the bpms. Next was the individual volume adjust for each audio track and filters with can either cut or adjust the high, mid and low frequencies of each track. Loop controls which I was familiar from other software which allows for placing marks at specific points of a song, but I didn’t need it in this case. Generally I can agree this software is good for non-professionals, but you can also practice a lot a being that is free.

I also read this article from Beyond Beatmatching, which was essentially on creating your own mashups. This article spoke on how its best not to be too complex, and to match songs of the same or similar key. For me this can be the biggest challenge, in finding songs that are close enough in key and have a similar bpm. This article also featured an interview with DJ Prince, who is a DJ and producer from Norway who has been around since the 1980′s. He goes on talk about how he had to do research back then by going to the library and reading about music theory, and discovering the root key of pop songs back then and applying them to his turntables to work. He also goes on to say how back then without affordable software he had to rely on musician friends to find the key in a song, which really shows me how far technology has come where we have free and available software that lessons our work load but obviously requires us to understand what exactly we are doing.

Screenshot of songs adjusted and playing together.

As I was using Mixxx and used two songs which were close enough in bpm I left the Instrumental track as it was. However I lowered the pitch of the A capella track since it was slightly faster than than the instrumentals and changing the pitch also changes the bpm or speed of the track. It was difficult to find the correct pitch of the A capella that would seem legitimate enough to match the instrumental. My final project is as close as I believe I could work the A capella which does not begin as sounding as good as it finishes.