mashups are an underutilized art form

2026-07-31

here's what i mean: sometimes two songs just naturally fit together; you don't need to do anything else to make the mashup work. and that's great! but sometimes songs don't quite work together. like, there's clearly potential, but the pieces don't quite connect.

a lot of mashups i see online fall into that latter category, but no real attempt is made to do anything about it. like, it's kinda just generally accepted that mashups won't be perfect, so people just accept the imperfections.

i don't accept the imperfections.

there's a third category as well: songs which just straight up don't fit together, at all. these are the most fun, because i get to force them to work together anyway. this is where i'm able to be the most creative, and the result is the most satisfying. in the world of mashups, there are no gods. you can do whatever it hell it takes to get songs to work together. and you'd be surprised how often the result is actually Good

i'm gonna be showcasing some of the stuff i've made in that third category, cuz it's the most interesting. i've narrowed this down into four (completely arbitrary) sections. each one has examples, which i've trimmed down into short snippets that get the point across since i know most people aren't interested enough to go listen to the full thing lol. there's 6 examples in total.

pitch shifting for fun and profit

pitch shifting stuff to make it fit in is super fun. for example, here's "the big goodbye but it's muffin time", in which the auctioneers sample is replaced with a suicidal muffin:

another more subtle-ish example is my mashup of burn the house down with block plaza from mario kart wii. the trumpet is pitch shifted to resemble the melody of block plaza, and it sounds really satisfying to my ears:

walking the line between "mashup" and "remix"

sometimes i get ideas in my head, where like, idk where they came from, but once i get the idea it doesn't go away until i make it real. here's "gec zone 2", a ""mashup"" of doritos and fritos with flat zone 2 from super smash bros brawl:

here's another one, this one's actually the most recent mashup i've made (at the time of writing). it's a mashup of scary monsters and nice sprites with a song my friend (RoseDoor) wrote called skies:

shoutout to her for recording the "YES! OH MY GOD!" sample for me lol. anyways you should listen to her album "tales", it's on streaming services and also on youtube, it's very good

just fucking the instrumental up

this one's old but i'm still so proud of it. xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx and hollywood baby already go surprisingly well together, but the icing on the cake is at the drop, where xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx is transformed to play the melody of hollywood baby.

i had to use an EQ to isolate the high/medium/low frequencies to make this work. i think the result is pretty seamless :)

literally just changing the melody

this is a mashup of three-thirty and thirsty, called "three-thirsty". that name is literally the only reason this mashup exists. the songs don't work together, which i assume is why no one's made this mashup before. but the pun was too good, i was determined to make this work no matter what.

you wouldn't know it if you don't know thirsty, but the melody is literally completely changed. i pitch shifted his voice into a new melody i wrote. it's sorta like a legally distinct version of the original melody? except the intent is to make it fit into a mashup rather than to evade copyright.

the three-thirty instrumental is also slightly changed. at the end of the chorus, one of the chords is changed to fit with the new melody.

is this cheating? maybe, idk. but the mashup wouldn't exist otherwise, and this is certainly much more interesting than if the songs just fit together on their own.

conclusion or something idk

uh, if u made it this far, thanks lol. i think pretty much everyone who reads my blog is a programming and/or computer nerd, and this blog post has none of that, but either way i hope you enjoyed, and better yet, i hope you were at least a little inspired! tech is kinda depressing rn, there's a whole world out there of other niche hobbies to care about (computers are still fun tho, you just need to wade through the sea of sadness a lil bit first)