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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.
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