April 28, 2004

• /loads that Garageband thingie /plays with it for hours, superimposing rythm tracks one over another over another... /realizes can't compose a tune if hairy monkey life depended on it /starts screeching madly, flings poo at LCD monitor and chews on clear acrylic mouse thing
• Nice car. Even nicer marketing ploy.
• i'm going to win
• I've been planning on doing a remix of "Loving the Alien" for a while now, this gives me an excuse.
• hmmm it's all clip from songs, not differentiated tracks. too bad. really narrows the creative possibilities
• hmmm it's all clip from songs, not differentiated tracks. too bad. really narrows the creative possibilities Exactly. I saw this post while at work and was all excited to do a track, but I can't do anything with this stuff. Why are rock acts so reluctant to release a capellas?
• Why are rock acts so reluctant to release a capellas? Because it rocks harder with a rhythm section? Hmmm?
• the best path to take for this remix is sampling a couple of the sparser tracks for hooks and then creating everything else from scratch
• Because it rocks harder with a rhythm section? Hmmm? True, but we're supposed to be building that rhythm section!
• Ah, I see now. What's needed is a filter, which compares left and right channels and only retains what's the same in both. This would normally be voice and kick drum only. Must be available somewhere, it's hardly a complex algorithm.
• the thing is, no elements are normally 100% stereo. that would violate the rule that songs should sound okay on all systems, no matter how crappy (including $5 mono AM radios) and, as well, it just sounds tacky when tracks use too many 'fake surround sound' (out of stereo phase) effects. so everything appears at least a LITTLE bit in both channels. as for the filter... i think the opposite is true -- that would hardly be a simple algorithm! eliminating non-similarities requires intelligence. keeping differences, however, is a rote process that you can do in 5 seconds in a simple audio editor. make two copies of the song. pan one hard left, pan the other hard right. invert one of the copies. mix the two together at 100%. you will wind up with a mono track containing the difference between the left and right channels. but that's not what you're after.
• why is this referred to as "bootlegging"?
• OK, I'm not talking 100% perfect separation, as there will be some crossover, as suture rightly points out. However ... if you go back and apply another iteration of suture's method, using the first product (mainly instrumental) plus another copy of the original (vocal + instrumental), once the similarities are removed we end up with vocal + crossover bits. See, no intelligence required. To do something like this purely digitally would be trivial indeed, and I'm sure there's a plug-in floating around out there somewhere. *googles* Look, this will do it.
• hmmm... i'm not sure... i'll try it manually and see how it turns out
• nope... won't work because the stereo image represented by the first product is not actually correct... one of the channels actually has its phase inverted from the original. so if you add it back to a monoaural mixdown of the whole mix, you'll only cancel all the stuff that was in one of the channels. the other channel's stereo stuff will be doubled in volume.
• Everytime I hear/read "Fame!" I start having that song run through my head - "I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly!" Now I'm stuck with it.
• Well, try it with the software and actually physically strip the phase-reversed stuff out rather than just cancelling it. It must be doable.
• Hey
• oh, it is. everything has to be done in mono.... there is software that does it, though, as you have found. i don't know how it works.
• I don't think there's a way to strip clean vocals from a full track. I could be completely wrong here because I'm self-taught with this stuff, but from everything I've read there would also be a problem because of the reverb. Something about it leaving a "ghost sound" of whatever you tried to edit out. I'll try to find a link...
• Bootleg? Mashup? Do they mean, like, remix? Or what? They want people to 'P. Diddy' all over the song?
• Nah, "P. Diddying" all over the song wouldn't change it much. Same song with just a bunch of, "uh-huh, yeah"s in it and the occasional, "bad boys, make some noise" and voila, instant remake!
• Bootleg in its most basic form is the vocals of one song over the tune of another. More complex varieties mix a larger number of different elements together (see Soulwax, Evolution Control Committee, Osymyso and the Avalanches for masters of the art, Richard X for a more pop take on the whole thang). Was called bootlegging in Britain when it first really kicked off as a genre in itself, as opposed to one-off novelties - there were even whole clubnights devoted to nothing but the bastard things - although why is not entirely clear. Obviously, though, it came from illicit alcohol supplies, then was applied to unlicensed recordings of music, so I suppose none of the steps is too far a leap. When it hit America, they decided to call it mash-up instead, but bootlegging seems to be taking over as the colloquialism of choice. And quite right too. Wikipedia, naturally, calls it neither, opting instead for Bastard Pop. /taking all the fun out of the discussion