How do djs make mashups

For the majority of my projects, I keep the instrumental track at or close to its native tempo and adjust the speed of the acapella to suit. Failing to EQ the vocal correctly could be the difference between a mashup that sounds great or one that sucks. When making a mashup, the ultimate goal is to make the instrumental and vocal parts sit together as seamlessly as possible. This can be achieved with some EQing.

Typically, vocal frequencies will range anywhere from 85hz to hz. This means that you can apply a high pass filter to any frequency below this threshold to ensure that there is no clashing with any sub bass from the instrumental track. There is so much more to EQing vocals, but if you are just starting to make your own mashups, I would encourage you to follow the above before developing your own skills further.

It is possible to layer a dry acapella one without any FX over the top of a professionally mastered instrumental track and it sound acceptable. However, the likelihood is that it will sound much better if you apply some FX to the acapella. There are many tips and tricks that you can try, but I always find that applying some reverb to the acapella will put the sounds in the correct space and make the final track sound more polished.

There are a host of plugins available which will allow you to take your production to the next level by adding sidechain, delay or even filters to the acapella. I recommend experimenting with some different techniques to see what suits your production style the most. It is unlikely that the volume of your acapella will sit perfectly with your instrumental straight away.

I tend to make subtle changes to the volume of the acapella until I feel that it sits correctly with the instrumental track. Once I have got to a point where I am relatively happy with my project, I will click save and go back to it several hours later or even the following day. Any changes can be easily made and you can then export your finished mashup as an MP3 or WAV or whichever audio format you prefer. I recommend sharing your first mashups with your close friends and ask them for their constructive feedback.

You may also want to play them out in your own sets and you will be able to identify where there is room for improvement in your next projects. Last updated 25 July, Audacity Audacity is free, cross-platform, and basically a must for all DJs. Learn how to use Audacity: How To Make Your Own DJ Edits course It is easy to load tracks, and cut and paste segments of them — to re-order them, remove them, extend the tracks, and anything else you can think of.

Ableton Live Ableton Live is the industry standard when it comes to everything from making simple re-edits, to mashups, bootlegs remixes and full-on productions.

If you want to learn how to produce music longer term, this is the one for you. Best bit is that Virtual DJ Home is absolutely free. Logic Pro X Designed, as is Ableton Live above, primarily for making music, Logix Pro X is also a great choice for making re-edit, bootlegs and mashups. Phil Morse. By using this site you agree to our privacy and cookie policy. Read it here. OK Cool :. I would say our Robin vs. The Cure came together like that.

Mashup detractors will say anyone can make a mashup, and it takes no effort, and I can throw together a mashup in 20 minutes. That is patently untrue. But there has been one mashup that we made were it literally took 20 minutes and that was our Robin vs. The Cure. A lot of hip-hop tempo stuff fits right on top of it. It took literally 20 minutes and it was like, we were done, there was nothing more that we could do to make it any better.

As DJ Adrian and The Mysterious D explained, the choice of source material is important not only because it can determine whether or not a mashup works musically, as in the Kiss vs.

Mashup artists devote a considerable amount of time to picking the sources and have different ways they go about it. In an interview with dj BC we discussed his process for choosing source material:.

Liam: How do you start out? Do you just hear a song and it reminds you of another song? How do you approach a mashup? Liam: Do you pay much attention to lyrical content, or is it mainly what you think will fit? BC: Yeah, I am thinking about lyrical content, clever titles, lyrics that interplay with each other.

So, for example, I have a huge stash, or archive, of a cappella files. I started making a beat around it and after I did that I was like, okay well what can I use for this and I started going through my stuff and trying different things. I was like, oh, well Rain and Rain. A lot of times I will try to have interplay between two different artists on the chorus in some way or another and how they lyrically complement each other.

In fact, for dj BC, the trial and error process of auditioning different vocal tracks over an instrumental and vice versa is part of the fun. Earworm outlines various methods of categorizing songs by their tempo, key, chord progression, and other musical elements so that when trying to combine songs there is a tool that can help. In his book, novice bootleggers are instructed to create a computer database that organizes their a cappella and instrumental tracks by numerous different structural elements of the music allowing them to be quickly accessed and compared.

As DJ Earworm explained to me in an interview, this database does not replace the type of decision making that dj BC discussed but it is a supplement to that process:. Liam: You have a different system, it seems from the book, than some of the other DJs that I have talked to. It sounds like you have this expansive database. When did you start keeping that? Earworm: Well, I have always really liked databases and going through large amounts of data to datamine and cherry pick.

I love computer programming so I always thought of mashups as a data problem. How do you find the stuff that is meant for each other and I am still working on this. I want to go a lot further and find, it is not just key and tempo, it is chord progression, melody. What is this about? Liam: In your process of creating a mashup does is it start with that database or is it inspiration?

Earworm: Usually it is inspiration. I do use it. Sometimes there is a song I really like and it is not obvious what I should combine it with and so I will go into the database and say what is in this key near this tempo and then I will look at it and if anything strikes me.

It is just a way of jogging your memory and then you will be like, oh this might work. Then you will just try this, try this, try this through brute force, and then all the sudden it is like, oh this has some chemistry. Earworm, like dj BC and others, also pays specific attention to the lyrical and thematic content of the songs that he samples. He is known for making mashups in which large numbers of samples are joined together by a common theme.

That was where I really stumbled on this thing were it was more than five or six [sampled sources]. I was really going to deconstruct it. That was going to be my big intro. I said, you know what I want to have this splashy intro that is like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Liam : So when you are constructing a mashup are you thinking in terms of thematic and lyrical similarities as well as what is going to work musically?

Earworm: Oh for sure. It can happen from either angle. And you know you find out what words do relate. And then he [Tom Petty] is really singing about, in a way, being free. Then I was thinking, well for her his freedom is just really annoying. So I said, this could be kind of a conflict, the male version and the female version. So you just, you can take almost two random songs and you just see what in them relates to each other.

BC explained to me how he went through a similar process of constructing a new lyrical meaning from disparate sources:. BC: How do they lyrically complement each other?

He is consumed by this. So [the mashup] sort of throws both songs into a different light. I am actually really proud of how that worked out lyrically, and I like the song as well. How it worked, but it went sort of beyond being clever and funny and you can listen to it and think about the meaning of the two songs.

After selecting sources comes the work of manipulating the samples, adding effects, and remixing the samples into a new track. The control allowed by the editing software is impressive. Virtually every musical and sonic element can be manipulated. However, as mentioned above, because mashup artists work with pre-recorded samples the amount of control is inherently limited. This limitation is not a creative liability.

Quite the opposite, working in a limited framework inspires creative thinking and problem solving. As with a poet who writes haiku, or a composer who writes fugues, the ability to create within set limitations is a skill that is valued by the mashup community. Once the samples have been combined into a new song the track is exported from the audio software, usually as an MP3.

Some mashup artists remaster their mashups for higher sound quality adjusting for things like bass distortion when played over a loud PA system, but this is not common and other producers feel this step is not necessary given the amount of mastering that a commercially released track has already gone through. Then the track can be uploaded to a personal website or filesharing site for distribution, and posted on GYBO to publicize it within the community.

Copyright issues arise in mashup production, distribution, and reception. The act of making a mashup, editing, remixing, and combining commercially released recordings, is a violation of copyright law.

Despite the fact that most mashups are not sold, their production is illegal and so is their distribution via the Internet, or on physical media. Interestingly, although a mashup is in violation of copyright law, nightclubs, radio and television stations, and other outlets that already pay blanket licensing fees to organizations like Broadcast Music, Inc.

At the time of this writing no mashup artist has been sued for copyright violation. However, the illegality of mashup production has affected the community in a number of ways. One direct effect is the issuance of cease and desist orders by record companies and media conglomerates. Cease and desist orders, as their name implies, are letters sent by the legal representatives of copyright holders to persons that are allegedly violating specific copyrights.

The orders are sent to the administrators of websites that host mashups as well as the Internet service providers which host those websites. There are far too many mashups for record companies to track down and act on any website that hosts any mashup. While there is no discernable pattern to which mashups incur cease and desist orders and which do not, in order for a mashup to get the attention of a record company it has likely become somewhat popular on the Internet, in the press, or on radio.

As such, being issued a cease and desist order is treated by some in the mashup community as a source of pride and carries with it some prestige and credibility. At the end of his post he asked if anyone else had dealt with this issue. In the first response to the post pilchard wrote,. We had one, took everything down to please the host, waited a week then sneaked them back, nothing happened, dont expect nothing will happen to you though, I reckon at worse, your hosts will remove your files pilchard Both posts congratulate mARKYbOY for what many outside the mashup community would view as a nuisance or even something of a legal concern.

The prestige attached to a cease and desist order is not necessarily tied to disobeying the order. Cease and desist orders have also brought some attention to the mashup community from popular media. There have also been other relatively high-profile cease and desist orders.

The album was primarily mashups of songs from the Green Day album American Idiot , and the mashup duo released the album under the name Dean Gray a textual remix of Green Day. American Edit , like the Grey Album before it, became quite popular online and within days of its release the website that Party Ben and team9 created for the album was issued a cease and desist order from Warner Brothers.

As with the Grey Album before it, the controversy that ensued over the cease and desist order generated a significant amount of media attention and additional illegal downloads.

Record companies that issue cease and desist orders to websites that host mashups do so to enforce their copyrights. The intention of the cease and desist order is to make mashups that are in violation of copyright unavailable. But, in many instances, cease and desist orders have served the opposite function by bringing attention to the very material that they hope to remove.

Additionally, because of the nature of digital music files and the ease with which they can be posted and re-posted on any number of websites, the targeted mashups remain readily available for download even after being removed from the websites that have received cease and desist orders.

Perhaps the most significant effect has been the dramatic limitation of commercially released mashups. The difficulty and cost associated with clearing all the samples contained in a typical mashup is prohibitive and only a few mashup artists have attempted to release commercial albums with cleared samples. It is a direct result of their connection with the recording industry that they had the capacity, via their record company, to navigate through the complicated process of clearing samples.

Few amateur musicians would be able to spend 6 months making phone calls and sending faxes, not to mention paying the licensing fees, in order to get copyright permission. As a result most mashups are released and distributed online for free. Earworm: I took my first handful of mashups and went to, I had heard that there was a club that played mashups called Bootie, and I went in there and met with Adrian and gave him a CD demo. This is the old way of thinking: that you need to, not necessarily capitalize in money, but you have to benefit from your music.

Anyway, so I put it out. One way the mashup community deals with its existence on the fringes of the recording industry is by subverting and satirizing the language and imagery used by governments and trade associations like the Recording Industry Association of America. The strategic and comedic appropriation of piratical terms and themes, now a widespread phenomenon thanks to sites like the controversial bit-torrent tracker The Pirate Bay and the associated Pirate political parties in several European countries, has a long history within the mashup community dating back at least to the founding of Bootie in There is a belief among some members of the community that mashups are an active form of protest against copyright law.

In September the mashup artist not I posted a response to a thread about mashups and society. He wrote,. I agree with not-I about the subversive angle of mashing. Yet gybo shows that be that as it may - we are still a fairly diverse lot when it comes to expressing our personal politics or lack thereof Wax Audio While some mashup artists, like not I and Wax Audio, are clear about their belief that mashups are a form of subversion others are less concerned.

Liam: I know that some people think of mashups as an act of activism against copyright law. Do you see what you are doing as any sort of a challenge or a protest to copyright law?

BC: Not at all. In fact I have little disclaimers on my website, as many mashup artists do, saying let me know if you have a problem with this being up and I will remove it from my website. I think that people just want to make music. They like doing it. The effects of copyright on the mashup community and the ways in which community members negotiate their relationship with copyright law are numerous and diverse.

One thing is certain: the current system of cease and desist orders is not sustainable, nor has it curbed the creation or sharing of mashups.