This assignment comes from this one. Originally, I was going to mix together different Taylor Swift songs, but Youtube to MP3 was not working for me anymore, so I used audio files that I already had on my computer from other projects. For this mashup, I used the songs Day n Nite by Kid Cudi, The Kiss of Venus by Dominic Fike, and Pink + White by Frank Ocean. I used Audacity to cut and put these songs together. It was fairly easy and I went into this project already having a vision for what it would sound like. In case SoundCloud takes it down, I have also embedded the audio file on here too.

“Mashup two (or more!) songs that are similar to each other, by either the same or different artist(s). Do your best to show the similarities—edit parts of the songs next to each other. If it’s possible to do this without making it sound terrible, try to overlay the songs at parts to highlight how much they sound alike.”

Similar Songs

Well, I did this assignment. I spent many many long hours recording different layers of these songs and trying to mix them together. Am I very proud of what I did? Yeah. Not cause I think it’s very good, a lot of the transitions could be better, and the whole thing could be better, but because there are some parts I like and I really tried my hardest.

To be fair, I did do a song mash-up a few years ago that turned out really well, and every other mash-up I do is compared to that high standard, but still.

To make this, I recorded different layers of both songs so I could pick apart the seams a little and put them back how I wanted. Youtube had most of them, but I had to find a program to isolate the lyrics of ‘filth’ myself.

I put it all in my editing method of choice, good old iMove, and played around until I got the thing you can hear now.

In the future, I probably would have chosen two songs that are more similar or at least have better transition points. Hey, maybe me in the future can come back and remix this assignment with new and improved editing skills. Until then, I think I’ll stick with the originals of these songs.

If you want to hear what might be my peak music editing skills, Take a Breezeblock is right here.

by Thomas Pulsifer

For Audra Young’s 4-star prompt, “Similar Songs,” I was trying to think of what songs I might know that sound just like another song. After struggling to think of an example, I decided to take a break and play the recently-updated Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In the game, I visited the home island of the hippie dog, Harv. The new theme that plays when visiting Harv’s island immediately struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I looked the tune up on YouTube and searched the comments to see if I was the only one, and thankfully, I wasn’t. Multiple people all claimed the song sounds incredibly similar to “Blackbird” by The Beatles, which is exactly what I was thinking of! So, using some editing magic in Audacity, I’ve compared and overlaid the two songs to show off their similarities. I also used Vegas Pro to edit together a video for the track which, in my opinion, qualifies this for a 5-star rating. I love The Beatles and Animal Crossing, so creating a crossover between the two was a lot of fun.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EgNK1ktsbavYeafRV6hfxWPFhf3yQOEO/view?usp=sharing

Mashup two (or more!) songs that are similar to each other, by either the same or different artist(s). Do your best to show the similarities—edit parts of the songs next to each other. If it’s possible to do this without making it sound terrible, try to overlay the songs at parts to highlight how much they sound alike.

https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/similar-songs/

I used CCMixter to find free music to use for this assignment. I chose “Precarity” by airtone and “She Moved Through the Fair” by Stefan Kartenberg because they both sounded someone similar. I used Audacity to edit the parts that they sounded alike together. I actually really like how it turned out. There are some parts that don’t sound all that great but overall I was impressed with how easily both songs worked together.

For my first mashup assignment, I decided to take another shot at properly mashing two songs up. However, as opposed to my earlier Kinks/MF DOOM mash-up, I specifically tried to think of two songs that were actually musically similar in terms of melody and harmony, not just rhythmically.

I ultimately chose “Does He Love You?” by Rilo Kiley and “Don’t Make It Harder On Me” by Chloe X Halle. I’ve loved that Rilo Kiley track since I was a kid and I found the Chloe X Halle track earlier this year and it instantly reminded me of “Does He Love You?”. In the process of mashing up these two tracks, I found that, indeed, they have nearly the same harmonic framework which made them blend together seamlessly.

For this assignment, I used Logic Pro X and Audacity. First, I downloaded .mp3s for both songs and used Audacity to remove or isolate the vocals. I also used Audacity to match the keys of the two songs. Using a metronome and the time-stretching functions in Logic, I was able to determine each song’s tempo and key. Ultimately I had to pitch “Does He Love You?” down by nine half-steps, which is why the instrumental is much deeper than in the original. I had initially planned to have them meet somewhere in the middle, but I felt the vocals lost too much clarity when I pitched them up.

Even though I approximated the tempo of each piece, the vocal performance still needed some adjustments, so the majority of the editing came from cutting up the vocals and inching them around so that they jive best with the instrumental.

Here is the final result:

Have you ever noticed that Twinkle Twinkle, the ABC Song and Ba Ba Black Sheep all have the same toon? For this assignment I edited the three songs together to show their similarity.

I was hard to find a all three songs with the same tempo so I had to do a little editing in Audacity. I then edited the three songs together. I was trying to make them blend with each other to carry the same toon but play different songs. With the different tempos this turned out to be a little difficult. But I still think it shows the similarities in the three songs.