this is a follow up to part 1. you can read part 1 first if you want, but like you don't have to
part 1 was basically just me briefly talking about how and why i like to put effort into my mashups, followed by a list of examples of shit i've made, and a small amount of commentary. this post is kinda similar but a little different: it's still just a list of shit i made, but i tried to actually write substantial stuff here as well. like, i'm making an actual point in each section, and i hope it can potentially inspire some people or something
(i didn't realize this until after i already compiled everything together here, but all of these are ajr mashups. i promise i listen to more music than just ajr, please believe me that this was (kinda mostly) just a coincidence lmao. and like even if you don't give a shit about ajr i hope there's still something here for you)
the mashup is incomplete without the video
ok i'm gonna yap for a sec here. you know how sometimes after being exposed to some seemingly unrelated things, some time later (like in dreams or in the shower or whatever) your brain makes connections and that gives you ideas?
that happened to me a little over a month ago. i work at a kinda shitty retail job. i was sweeping the floor, and i had "larping the rooms" (remix by the larping tombstone of "looping the rooms") stuck in my head. and then i came up with the pun "AJlaRp".
i mentioned in the previous part that a similar thing happened with my mashup "three-thirsty". where i come up with the title first, and like, it's too good of a pun to not make it real. so that's how this came to be:
full video on youtube
thanks $RETAIL_JOB.
the video is modelled after the larping the rooms music video (which is itself modelled after the looping the rooms music video). the larping the rooms video has stop signs with japanese text on them, and, at least to my rotted brain, when i first watched it, the signs almost looked like they said "67" at first. so, y'know.
overall i'm really happy with how this turned out. some notable things about the mashup itself:
the vocals are swung in the beginning. you hear it briefly in the snippet i embedded, but yeah, the original song isn't swung, i had to do that to make it fit.
it's actually not that difficult: i split the audio into eighth notes so each clip contained one syllable, then i toggled the triplet grid, and then i stretched the clips to fit into the new grid (where alternating clips are twice as long as the following clip). i hope that made sense.
in ableton, you can hold down shift when resizing clips to change their speed. that's what i did here.
there's multiple pitch changes in the vocals: "but i can't do this shit again", and "maybe that's the way i feel" are both pitched to better fit in with the other song
later on in the mashup, when it gets to the bridge, i do even more pitch shifting :3
but as the heading of this section hinted at, i feel like this mashup isn't complete without the video accomponying it. i wouldn't have published this as just audio. i think part of that is because of how iconic the original video is. i'm also just really happy with how my video turned out.
of all the mashups/remixes i've ever made, for some reason this was the one to break containment. as of me writing this, it's currently at over 130k views on youtube. which is kinda extremely fucking wild to me. i know that in the grand scheme of things that's not much, but for something kinda relatively niche like this, and especially given what i'm used to from videos like this, this was insane. i might write something sometime about my thoughts on metrics like this, and whether or not it's good to care about them (spoiler: it's nuanced!), but clearly i do care about them at least a little bit, and the overwhelmingly positive response from people in the comments has been just, so heartwarming to read. so yeah. i'm glad i thought of that dumb pun lol
you can mash up 2 instrumentals, the cops can't stop you i think
this is a mashup of "the big goodbye" by ajr with "unbearably white" by vampire weekend. i thought of this mashup before the big goodbye even officially released, because i heard a teaser of it and realized how similar they sound.
there's some depth here: for one, that first note in the riff from unbearably white is actually altered to fit with the big goodbye. the original chord contains a nasty tritone (which sounds cool in the original song, but clashes heavily here), so i plopped it into melodyne to make it sound more pleasant. the resulting chord is similar enough to the original that, even knowing the original song, my non-pitch-perfect ears don't really notice a difference in context, besides the fact that the original chord sounds Wrong and Clashy, whereas this chord actually fits.
but besides that, what's notable here is that, at least in the snippet i embedded above, this isn't a mashup of an instrumental track with a different vocal track. it's a mashup of two instrumental tracks. and idk, i feel like you don't see that too often.
it is actually a complete mashup, so i do use the vocal track of unbearably white later on, but not without mixing in more of its instrumental. like here, i use both the vocals and the drums from unbearably white:
i actually have a second track of vocals layered on top of the first track here, but pitched an octave higher (and panned slightly), to replicate a vocal effect from that part of the big goodbye.
(also, i think i should note that unbearably white doesn't have a consistent fixed tempo, so i couldn't just line the tracks up once and have it carry through the entire song like i normally do. that's unrelated, i just wanted to point it out :P)
but you can do more. check this out, if you're mixing two instrumental tracks, but you still don't have a vocal track that fits very well, well, that's the perfect opportunity for...
three-way mashups!
the vocal track is from "holding on to you" by twenty one pilots. i would've thought that playing 3 songs at once would sound bad and cluttered, like too much is happening, but honestly i think the result sounds really natural and nice! holding on to you fits nicely with both of the other songs, and the instrumental also slots in naturally, so it works really well!
if you have the stems you can do some crazy shit
believe it or not, "gecord player" (my mashup of "mememe" by 100 gecs with "record player" by ajr and daisy the great) wasn't created because i thought of the pun first. the pun actually came after i already started working on it. no, it started because i realized i could gec-ify jack's voice:
vocals pitched up 6 semitones + autotune + a little overdrive sprinkled on top, and boom, Jec Met.
i really fucked with the way that sounded, so next i had to make the choruses. those were much more difficult to make work, because the songs don't actually work together at all besides that one part. but that's fine: 100 gecs have officially released the stems of their songs! so, some melodyning and pitch-shifting later, i came out with this:
honestly, as a whole, i don't think gecord player ranks very highly for me for mashups i've made. but i'm still proud that i was able to make this work at all. listen closely to the instrumental. the bloops follow the melody of record player, rather than mememe. and i changed the chords the electric guitar plays to work with record player. the bassline is changed as well.
that electric guitar was pretty difficult to get to a point where i liked how it sounded. but it also highlights something i really like about making mashups like this: limitations lead to creativity. i couldn't just make it play whatever i wanted. i had to use the existing audio, and pitch it if necessary. i could only pitch it so far before it started to sound like shit, and my old-ass pirated melodyne (because newer versions don't work in wine for me lol) doesn't really work with the electric guitar, so i could only change the pitch of the audio as a whole, not individual notes.
that means that, for example, i can't pitch a Db major chord (IV) down to C minor (iii). likewise, i couldn't pitch F minor (vi) to Eb major (V). the structure of the chord needs to stay the same. that limited my options for what chords i could choose that wouldn't sound like shit. i also don't have much experience with writing, like, actual music, and my music theory knowledge is somewhat limited, so making this all work was a challenge for me.
another example of the same thing
this one is called OUTDATED_TIKTOK_TREND.mp3. it's a mashup of two ajr songs: "world's smallest violin" and "sober up":
the bridge of sober up is changed to sound like the choruses(?) of world's smallest violin. once again, i have the official stems for sober up, so i was able to make this work.
this is one of the earliest mashups i ever made, and i kinda just went off of vibes when making it. like, what sounds good. there's not much music theory behind it. and in this case i'm happy with that, because there's some interesting decisions which i'm not sure i would've ended up at if i didn't just fuck around (given my limited experience).
what's next?
idk. motivation's been low recently, so i'm trying to work on a few ambitious projects but progress is very slow. one of those projects was one i was hoping to include here, but i don't really wanna delay this post, so maybe i'll write a part 3 someday, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
thanks for reading :) i know most of the people who read my blog don't really give a shit about ajr mashups (waow a sebsite post with no cursed c facts?? bro fell off 🥀), so if you made it to the end, i really appreciate you <3