MW – I Get Back Up

This is something that me and a friend have started working on for a new project. It’s just the part with my verse. We’re still working on it. Thanks for listening!

-Donny Jarko

My attempts at cobbling together a song for this week’s Hellagem were unsuccessful, so I decided instead to revisit a piece I originally composed for the 2007 Atlanta Laptop Battle preliminaries.

I waited so long to finally release this because it truly is a B-side as far as Poodleface videos go… I am really pleased with the sleazy saxophone feel of it combined with using the sound effects in an interesting way, but by and large there is far too much padding in this one as I tried to make it work in the 2:00 framework (this was the upper limit of performances in the preliminaries, which is why Custom Made is also almost exactly 2 minutes).

This was the video I played first, and there was a very clear reason I did so… in the 2006 Battles (where Custom Made was born) I had taken the notion of using the laptop as a performance instrument literally, making videos that utilized the screen. At the time, the judges felt I was violating the spirit of the event by not doing live manipulation, so I did not win a single round. I actually agree with this in retrospect, I gleefully remained ignorant in order to do precisely what I wanted to do, interpreting the rules as I saw fit. Sometimes you have to do that and accept the consequences that may follow.

So, getting back to the original point, rather than completely abandon video, I decided to thumb my nose at the event slightly, so to speak, by continuing to do videos while manipulating the instrumentation with a MIDI controller. The last line of the video being “They saw my power, no way they’re gonna dog me this year” was meant to be a literal statement to how I felt about how my previous experience with the event had gone down. Again, in retrospect, I understand everyone’s processes, and the 300,000 views for “Custom Made” on YouTube have been their own brand of vindication, but I figured you guys might want to know the background of this video.

My tools for making these videos is a combination of Sony Vegas and Ableton Live. Briefly, a temporary music track is first created in Ableton using the videos within the session as a guideline of how I will utilize them, then once the tempo and structure is set I export this to Vegas to do the actual video manipulation, finally returning to Live for the final audio mixdown. Then the whole thing is rendered in Vegas.

My manipulation of this video yesterday was limited to making the poodleface do crazy zooms at the end. I left it as flawed as it is, also knowing that if I started editing it again the whole thing might just fall to pieces.

Anyway, at some point in the future I’ll go a little deeper into creative decisions that are made in the process of making these. For now enjoy this golden poodleface oldie.

tiny stripper

I had the idea for this mashup a while ago, and at that point the idea was mostly conceptual (stripper/dancer).  It wasn’t until I first overlayed the two songs that I realized how perfectly they fit together.  They have essentially the same chord progression, or at least very similar ones; the tempos are within a few beats per minute of each other; and the keys are only two half steps apart.  Altogether, it was an amazing coincidence and a very exciting find.  

The actual crafting of the thing was a little bumpier.  I started out on Ableton, but the warp feature was introducing wierd digital noise (giving Elton a kind of underwater-in-space sound), so I switched to Acid, then switched back because I thought I could fix Ableton, then finally gave up and returned to Acid.  ”Tiny Dancer” was evidently not recorded to a metronome, and much of it is just EJ on piano and vocals, so the timing is altogether pretty mushy.  It took a lot of brute-force, cut-and-paste quantizing to make it all happen.

By the way, my original idea was to do a mashup of “You Don’t Know Me” by Ben Folds with “U Don’t Know Me” by T.I.  It turns out that this idea was as obvious to other people as it was to me – I thought to check online to see if it exists, and it does (it’s by team9).  I decided I couldn’t have done anything particularly different or better, so I moved on.  I hope you all enjoy what I came up with.

T-Pain and Elton John are both hit machines and they both have a love for ridiculous eyewear.

A Milli Of The Near Future

Here is a mashup of Li’l Wayne – A Milli and Klaxons – It’s Not Over Yet. This is a good example of playing a naturally slow a capella at double speed with a song at regular speed. In most cases the rhythm of the a capella won’t match, since slower a capellas are usually performed loosely with more breathing room. Leave it to Weezy (the best rapper alive?) to hold it down on tracks he has never heard before. The Klaxons’ song is actually a cover of a song by Grace. I decided to title it after the Klaxons’ album, Myths Of The Near Future, since it seemed to work better than most permutations of A Milli and It’s Not Over Yet. Try them yourself and you’ll see what I mean. (It’s Not A Milli Yet? WEAK!) Bon appétit.

Here’s a mashup of “Dos Locos” by Monchy & Alexandra and “Yes Sir” by The Pack.  The original inspiration was me thinking that the lyrics “que tontos, que locos” would go well conceptually with a hyphy track.  I hope this bilingual play on words works, but my Spanish is pretty weak so I don’t know.  I had to listen to a lot of hyphy songs to find the right one, and in the process I also gained a greater appreciation for the genre.  My appreciation for the genre of Bachata has grown as well – especially the sweet guitar arpeggios.  I hope you all enjoy.

download

Whatever Paper Planes You Like

This is just an instrumental and an a capella track. Most of the work in making mashups is finding the tracks in the first place. I spent a really long time looking for the champagne sound.

I find that making mashups is a good way to surprise yourself. After placing two waveforms together on beat there are often some good unintended consequences that happen later on in the song. For example, listen to 1:48 in this song. I didn’t plan for that little event to happen. I find the musical ideas that emerge when making mashups very fun and interesting. 

Historical note: I made this mashup before I ever heard Swagger Like Us.

Enjoy!