Weekly Mashup

27 Jun 2012

Weekly Mashup is out for the summer.

To celebrate this, we're making all 26 mashups available for download here (210 MB). You can listen to individual mashups in the archive.

Get a CD

We're also doing a small run of custom-printed CDs with the 21 best mashups – which is as many as would fit on there. The tracks are ordered for optimal listening, they have nice front and back covers, and you can order one here:

(Most of the price goes to the materials involved in making and sending the CD to you. We're not really making any money here.)

Get notified

We'll be back in September with new mashups. To be notified when we're back, enter your e-mail address here:

Until then, there's always the archive.

19 Jun 2012
  • Play

    Hotel California (dub mix)

    Shum mashup - 3:23

I love chilling out to some old school dub tracks. Soon after Leonard showed me the Hotel California studio acapella he’d found, this happened.

  • In this mashup:
  • iTunes Hotel California (acapella) by The Eagles
  • YouTube Bali Hi by Scientist
Created by Shum using Ableton Live 8.
12 Jun 2012
  • Play

    Funky Paso

    Børsen mashup - 3:21

Børsen returns with a shredding of Funky Town topped with Sak Noel’s attempt at a follow-up to his big hit last year.

  • In this mashup:
  • iTunes Paso by Sak Noel
  • iTunes Funky Town by Lipps Inc.
Created by Børsen using Cubase 6.5.
5 Jun 2012
  • Play

    Don't Stop, Lady

    Shum mashup — 5:51

Oliver’s remix of Foster the People’s Don’t Stop is already awesome, but with a sprinkling of Modjo it’s an instant dancefloor hit.

The Lady parts start at 2:00.

  • In this mashup:
  • Soundcloud Don’t Stop (Oliver remix) by Foster the People
  • Lady by Modjo
  • Lady (acapella) by Modjo
Created by Shum using Ableton Live 8.
29 May 2012
  • Play

    Stylo + Canon

    Shum mashup — 3:28

Back story: Ever since I first heard Canon off Justice's newest album, I had wanted to mash it with Gorillaz' Stylo due to their similar bass ostinatoes. After producing a quick proof-of-concept in Traktor, I came to the conclusion that this mashup would only become elegant enough to publish if I could find an acapella version of Stylo.

After a lot of searching, I realized an acapella version of Stylo was nowhere to find. I wasn't hoping for a studio acapella, as those are pretty rare, but not even the do-it-yourself enthusiasts of the acapella sites I frequent had made any versions of Stylo. So, I had to make my own.

Making your own acapella involves having the original version of a track (with vocals) and an instrumental version (without vocals). If these line up perfectly – which they probably would if both are official releases – you can use destructive interference to extract the vocals by simply subtracting the waveforms of the instrumental from the vocal version. And it will probably sound pretty good.

If you are not able to get your hands on a clean instrumental version of the same track, you can create your own, fake instrumental instead by repeating parts of the track that does not include vocals. Of course, it's pretty much impossible to construct a fake instrumental where every beat lines up perfectly with the original (to 1/44100th of a second), so instead of simply subtracting the waveform, you can use the open source kn0ck0ut plugin to perform an analysis of the frequencies represented at each point in time in the instrumental, and then subtract these frequencies from the vocal version at the same time points. This method does not produce great sounding acapellas (and due to the way the plugin is implemented, the result is in mono), but they are sometimes good enough to use in mashups.

Making the fake instrumental, I discovered why no one else had published their own DIY acapellas: Despite the electronic sound, every instrument and synthesizer in Stylo is played by humans (contra electronic sequencers), resulting in small human timing variations that are a pain to line up when repeating a small part of the track. Nevertheless, I spent a few hours in Ableton Live trying to line them up to my best ability without removing whatever swing the rhythm might have. The easiest way to do this is to simply ignore any other beats but the 1's and 3's, which means that the few percussion sounds that ended up not lining up with the instrumental at all can be heard in my resulting acapella.

After all this, I put my crappy acapella on top of Canon and littered it with effects to mask the poor sound quality of the acapella. The resulting mashup doesn't sound that good, but it confirms the hunch that started it all: I would probably like Stylo better if it had the rhythmic variety of Canon.

Created by Shum using Ableton Live 8 and Audacity 2 with the kn0ck0ut plugin.
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