Becoming the Worst DJ Part 2
Practice makes perfect
Introduction
A few months ago, I saw a bunch of videos on the internet where people made intentionally bad beats/mashups. I was inspired, and I went on a quest to become the best 'worst' DJ I could. I made 11 little clips, and had a really fun time doing it. You can (and should) check it out here if you haven't already.
That was great, and I'm back for round 2. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect, and I'm intent on becoming better (or worse as it were) at DJing.
Learning Something
Every time I do a part 2 to a project, I try and learn something new: a new tactic, a new tool, etc. This time, I found a new plugin called Inner Pitch 2 for pitch modulation. This plugin results in much cleaner pitch modulation than Audacity's built-in tool I was using previously. However, the clips I worked with still suffer (to some degree) from artifacts from vocal separation and tempo change.
Vocal separation is super tricky. When you listen to a song, all of the audio has been mixed down into one track. Trying to separate the vocals from the instruments is kind of like trying to turn cake batter back into flour, sugar, and eggs. To do this, we use machine learning models that have been trained to 'pull apart' the audio the best they can. These models are shown examples of mixed tracks (a final song), and the individual recordings of the song's vocals and instrumentals. The models learn how to turn a mixed song into a vocal track and an instrumental one. Then, they can separate a song pretty well, though generally not perfectly.
Why does changing a song's tempo distort the audio? You can think of audio as a waveform.
However, this changes both the pitch and the tempo. If you want to speed up a song without changing the pitch, you have to slice up the waveform into lots of teeny slices, and delete some of them, crossfading the clips. This has the negative effect of making your audio sound a little "fluttery," which diminishes the quality. Slowing down a song works the other way around. Instead of stretching the slices (which would lower the pitch) or inventing missing audio to fill the gaps, the software duplicates and repeats tiny slices to make the sound take longer to play. While algorithms exist for doing this in an intelligent way, this still also decreases audio quality.
Since I'm using free software for everything, my audio suffers from these issues. But that's okay. I'm not trying to make the best mashups, just silly ones.
Getting to the Music
When I set out to do this round of bad mashups, I had a few criteria I was shooting for.
- The mashups should be a little bit cursed:
These mashups had the same aim as the last post. They were supposed to combine unlikely songs, and not quite be 'good'. - The mashups should not be terrible:
Not wanting 'good' songs is different from wanting bad songs. I could technically make terrible mashups by slapping two songs that don't go together at all into the same track and creating a cacophony. That's not the goal here. The songs should be mostly aesthetically pleasing. - The mashups should be a good combination of both of the source songs:
The more a mashup draws from the both songs, the better.
So that's how I'll be evaluating my mashups.
As with the last post, not all of my mashup ideas merited a full song, so some of these are shorter than others. That being said, there's at least 20 minutes of music in this post, so grab some headphones and buckle up.
The Songs
As I was working on this post, I had a bunch of ideas for songs that would go well together, and some songs that wouldn't. Surprisingly, some mashups that worked in my head didn't work at all when I tried to put them together. Even more surprisingly, I was able to force some songs into mashups against their will.
This first song is an example of the latter. I chose two songs with different chord progressions and brute forced them to work together. I accomplished this by using my new Inner Pitch 2 plugin to transpose individual notes from the vocals into a major key. I give you, "Baby by Justin Bieber, but with chorus from Uprising by Muse". Since this one's not that great, you don't have to listen to the full thing. You might just want to try the first minute.
Evaluation
Was it cursed? Yes
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes
Did it fully combine the source songs? Not really. All I did was replace the chorus of one song with another.
Final Rating: 3/5
I had the idea for this next song, thinking it would be fun to use 'The Skarn', a song from the fictional film Threat Level Midnight from the TV show The Office. However, The Skarn was never recorded as a song or released as a song. I had to get the audio from the original TV episode and strip everything out, resulting in the lowest quality audio of any clip in this post.
Evaluation
Was it cursed? Yes
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes (I think)
Did it fully combine the source songs? Yes
Final Rating: 3.5/5 (points off for audio quality)
Reflecting on what made some of my other mashups successful, I remembered that EDM hits make a great half of the mashup. This time, instead of using the EDM instrumentals, I put the EDM vocals in a Hatsune Miku song. Hatsune Miku is a virtual Japanese pop singer created in 2007. She is immensely popular among nerds on the internet. In spite of that, I couldn't have named a single Hatsune Miku song before looking some up to try fitting one into this post, so you may not recognize this one.
Evaluation
Was it cursed? I think so
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes
Did it fully combine the source songs? Yes
Final Rating: 4/5, even though it was short.
I learned about Mamushi by Megan Thee Stallion when one of my family members sang it at karaoke. The ridiculous vocals made this seem like a fun song to include. The original has a very piano-heavy beat, so I thought I could replace it with a different piano-heavy song. While it seems like all I did was pop the audio on top of the piano, this one was actually a lot of work, since the jazzy nature of Linus and Lucy meant the tempo wasn't perfectly constant. I had to do a lot of subtle tempo correction, but in the end it worked out:
Evaluation
Was it cursed? Yes
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes
Did it fully combine the source songs? Yes, but could've been a little better
Final Rating: 4/5
At this point, I was starting to cook with the 'cursed song combo' thing.
Evaluation
Was it cursed? Yes
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes
Did it fully combine the source songs? Yes
Final Rating: 4.5/5
One genre I didn't explore in my first foray into DJing was screamo. I tried to put it with the least screamo feeling song I could imagine. These were at very different tempos, so I had to speed one up and slow the other down, but it still turned out.
Evaluation
Was it cursed? Yes
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes
Did it fully combine the source songs? Yes
Final Rating: 4.5/5
I felt like I really nailed the song choice for this next one. Rack City by Tyga was on the radio all the time when I was in high school, and is a good bass-heavy party song. Not to toot my own horn, but mixing it with the theme song to a Taiwanese soap opera from the '80s was a stroke of genius.
Evaluation
Was it cursed? Yes
Was it somewhat aesthetically pleasing? Yes
Did it fully combine the source songs? Yes
Final Rating: 5/5
Really, I feel like that's the only perfect mashup I made this time around. Just like with my last DJ attempt, I got too deep into mashup making and just started making songs that sounded nice. I also wanted to do a few full-song mashups. In my opinion, they're objectively good mashups, but not very good for being 'cursed'.
Full-Song Mashups
The idea for this mashup didn't actually originate with me. Elder Rule suggested it to me while we were doing splits on my mission. Clearly, the idea resonated with me because it's been bouncing around my mind for over a decade. I had a little bit of trouble with some of the audio separation, but this one wasn't very cursed. (Though including an Imagine Dragons song might make a song cursed by default)
Evaluation
Like I said, this one wasn't cursed, but I think it turned out pretty good.
This next mashup was inspired by all the LDS wedding receptions I've gone to over the course of my life. Both of these songs are real crowd pleasers in that context. Imagine hearing one after drinking 3 dirty sodas at your cousin Brynnlee's wedding reception. It would go hard.
Evaluation
I think this was just a good (non-cursed) mashup. It would've been even better if I had done it with top-tier audio manipulation tools, but I keep my hobbies as free as possible.
The final mashup also ended up being just kind of good and not cursed. I came up with the idea for this one many years ago, and it's been rattling around in my mental deep storage until it was dredged up by my working on this post. I worked on this one song for over 4 hours, and I think it shows.
When I was about 10 years old, my dad heard Stacy's Mom on the radio and liked it so much that he bought the album it was from on CD, and he played it very often as I grew up. I was reminded forcefully of that time in my life as I worked on this remix.
It was really fun to combine a song about telling a girl she doesn't know she's pretty with a song about how you like her mom instead.
Evaluation
As far as non-cursed mashups go, this was by far my favorite. I think it sounds good, the mix is great, and the text of the song ends up being pretty funny.
Conclusion
Part 1 of my DJ career was a real crowd pleaser. I hope that part 2 didn't disappoint. At any rate, I had a great time making them.
