“I realized that as an industry we’d kind of been smoking crack,” said Universal exec Barney Wragg, after leaving the label in 2005. (Wragg took a job as head of digital music at EMI the next year.)
And James Mercer, the lead singer of indie band the Shins, was even more blunt. “You see these articles about the disaster in the music business,” he said. “When you think about how unhealthy the business has been, this is like lancing the fucking boil and cleaning it out. It’s not a fucking disaster to regular bands out there.”
I get email on a regular basis from readers wanting me to mashup song xyz with zyx. Thomas Irvin doesn’t bother to write me, however. Instead, he catalogs his ideas on his web site.
Ever notice a song whose melody sounds remarkably similar to some other song? I seem to be afflicted by a birth defect that makes me notice these songs all the time. So I’ve compiled this list of songs that sound like other songs. In compiling this list, my goal is to present excerpts of the songs in question and leave any other determinations up to you, the listener.
Lots of great observations in his list. If this doesn’t convince you that almost all art and music is pretty much derivative, I don’t know what will.
Imagine all the girls,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums
Without a drum track to drop markers on, warping an acapella can be especially challenging. This quick little tip makes it easy.
For this method to work, you’ll need not only an isolated acapella track but also an accompanying drum or full length track of exactly the same length. If you’ve extracted all the tracks from a DTS recording or happen to have a set of stems from a multitrack session, you’re good to go.
Follow these 3 simple steps to quickly warp an acapella:
Drop the song’s drum track into a clip. Place warp markers or auto-warp the clip to your satisfaction.
Copy that same beatmapped clip into another session track. Highlight that copied clip so you can view the waveform at the bottom of the screen.
Drag the acapella audio file on to the waveform of the copied clip. Notice that the drum track waveform is replaced with the acapella but the original warp markers stay in place. This is what we want.
Here’s a movie walkthrough of the aforementioned process using the stems for “The Bomb” by New Young Pony Club.
So what happened? Using this technique, I was able to quickly place warp markers on a drum track and then apply those same markers to my acapella track. In comparison, if I were to warp the acapella without a guide track, my attempt would be prone to timing errors due to the guesswork and estimation involved.
I dropped this one at Electro Bootie last weekend and it went over huge. I thought it deserved a proper release and so did the kind folks at Audioporn Central. In fact, it’s featured today on the APC as an Illegal Sunday World Premiere!
FM (“Girls on the Dance Floor”) vs. Tone Loc + Peaches (“Wild Thing”) vs. Prince (“Erotic City”) vs. Yazoo (“Goodbye 70’s”) Wild Thing on the Dance Floor (DJ Matt Hite Mashup)
D# Minor, 120 bpm
Bootie is one of my all-time favorite places to play and I’m always excited when I get invited back. I’ll be hitting the decks in the Electro-Bootie room this month, spinning an eclectic mix of electro boots and remixes. Won’t you join me?
