Mash Ups Technology, Hardware, software, or WHAT? Options

[Voicedude]

I've got a new obsession: THE hottest thing in England right now (and almost unheard of here in the US). They're called Mash Ups (or sometimes Bootlegs or Bastard Mixes). In case this is new to you too, let me point you to the one that got me started: It's called "Paperback Believer", and it's exactly what you might expect from the title. They somehow took the vocals from the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" and put them to the vocal-less tracks of The Monkees' "I'm A Believer". The results are astounding:

www.gohomeproductions.co.uk

Since those ARE The Beatles vocals and those ARE The Monkees original tracks, my question is: how the heck are they DOING this? Especially when considering older material, I'm at a loss for the techniques involved.
Some are better than others, but the good ones are nothing short of genius! Clearly these guys (the good ones) are MUSICIANS, because of their obvious knowledge of relative keys, chord structures, pentameter, etc., et al, blah blah, yadda yadda. And, they love being offbeat, so to speak. The fave Mash Ups are the one's that put a hard rocker or punk song with some dance oriented song; like Baha Men Vs. Ministry - Who Let Junkies Out?, or Doors Vs. Blondie - Rapture On The Storm.

So again I ask: HOW DEY DO DAT? It's clearly WAY beyond something like the OOPS method (inverting the right track & panning both to the center) and their apparent ability to do these so cleanly with 60's cuts smacks of something high tech. Any ideas? Is it hardware? Is it available software (and is it available for Mac OS)? Anything that somebody has heard of? It CAN'T be just a fifty band EQ or something, can it? Check out a few and get back to me. Heck, get 'back' to me any way - I'm dying of curiousity...

...anyone?....anyone?.....Buehler?.....anyone?....

- Voicedude


This post has been edited by Voicedude: Sat 6 Mar 2004, 20:46

[divan]

not shure of this could be any help ... but i remember one day a friend o mine played during a party a mashup of madonnas "music" and daftpunks "da funk". i asked him about this record... he told that it was a bootleg. i liked the track, but no chance to get this record. so i just sampled the originals and mixed them up only by beatmatching. additionally i added pieces of "wdpk 83.7 fm"(also daftpunk) and "disco to disco" from les rhytmes digitales. fortunately all thes tracks dont need any tweaking the keys or chords or whatever. this mix was just finding the right loops and "layer" them all with the same BPM...
I think if u find 2 track that share nearly the same harmonics it will work.... not much help probably ... hm...

[Voicedude]

Yeah, I'm just trying to find out what technology is used to get some of these isolated tracks. F'rinstance: One of my faves is Queen's Crazy Litlle Thing Called Love with vocals from Dear Prudence and Fool On The Hill. Fool may have panned vocals, but I don't believe that Prudence does, and the vocals are removed so cleanly from Crazy it's scary! (no traces left on that turnaround breakdown!) I've already done some of the easy ones myself: matching Usher's U Remind Me's a capella with Mary J. Blige's Family Affair instrumental (the match up on the bridge was downrigt spooky!), but those are CAKE compared to a lof of the stuff I'm hearing! They have GOT to be using SOMETHING to either filter or EQ the instruments or vocals out! I' just like to know WHAT specifically....

[eMpTy]

The vocals are usually always recorded on the center channel so using phase reversal you can remove everything else.

Turn the left channel 180deg out of phase and add it to the right channel and vice versa, right to left and you cancel out anything that is just in the center of the track. Using the levels and eq you can usually remove most of the vocals from a track. Then you could use the compare function in Wavelab to extract the difference of the two tracks, leaving you with the vocals and what ever else was on the center channel.

Remember that the rest of the track wil now be 180deg out of phase so you might want to delay one side or just use mono.

This post has been edited by eMpTy: Wed 17 Mar 2004, 07:17

[eMpTy]

Oh yeah then you could use Antares Auto tune to get the vocals in key for the other piece of music.