So I Made A Mashup, And Then… | Hacker News Reader

So I Made A Mashup, And Then…

stevestreza.com

257 pointscraigkerstiens98 comments

About 10 years ago I did a spoof version of a 50 Cent song and posted it on one forum - it took off in a really big way with people sharing it on forums and via email (this was before YouTube or Facebook), and ended up getting heavy radio play all over Europe and Australia. I signed a management and publishing deal and ended up producing music professionally for a few years before I decided to go to college for computer science.

The power of creating something resonant and putting it on the internet is huge, and it's still totally possible today.

I believe that consumer startups in the early stages are no different. You need to find a way of presenting yourself that resonates emotionally with your desired audience, to the extent that they want to share that feeling with others.

Congrats on the viral success! It's a really fun experience.

50 pence posts on hacker news. Amazing. Well done my friend, if it is indeed you - that song was and is most amusing. Surely the highlight must've been yoda playing it on radio 1?

It was a big moment! A load of other crazy stuff happened around the same time - the original artists were played the track and approved it for general release, and I was getting about 100 emails a day from random listeners who had tracked me down.

The best advice I ever got was not to associate my real name with the track, so that a relatively crappy 'one hit wonder' didn't define me forever. Now it doesn't matter as much. Suffice to say, I'm firmly in favor of pseudonyms online.

I have to ask, what was the song? Can we have a link?

It was indeed 'In Da Pub' by 50 Pence aka ladon86. Here's a video with lyrics in the desc to help with the British-isms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pioFIcQw2zM

And GEMA actually blocks it, pretending its the original 50-cents track..

My guess is "50 Pence - In Da Pub"

Nice job! I'm one of the people behind the LMFAO parody "We're NASA And We Know It" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFvNhsWMU0c) and the LaughPong channel (www.youtube.com/laughpong). It's awesome to see stuff you create like this explode - congrats!

Just a few notes about how Youtube works: Chances are, you got a lot more views in the first 24 hours than you think you did. Youtube viewcounts update live until 302 to 308, and then they freeze for a few hours.

It'll update after 6 to 8 hours, but it still lags significantly behind real views. It only updates views every 8 hours or so after that, and it takes a few days for the displayed viewcount to catch up to the actual viewcount (We've had instances of videos with more thousands more likes than views... which is entertaining. :p)

One way you can sometimes get a more accurate view is by searching for your video. For some reason, the viewcount on the Youtube Search Results page is NOT linked to the viewcount displayed on the individual video page. It also lags behind, but it appears to update faster.

I mostly wanted to take the chance to say thank you for the "We're NASA And We Know It" video. It was fantastic, and just thinking about it still makes me chuckle.

I'm also curious why google is hiding actual viewcount? I can't think of a viable reason, but I was wondering if you had any insight, or even baseless speculation?

Here's a video that explains it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

tl:dr; caching, data syncing, abuse.

Thanks you, and thanks for the YouTube Search tip! I'm not at all ashamed to admit I'm refreshing that page like crazy to see the count go up, haha. :)

Very cool! The mashup is really catchy and the author did a great job mixing LMFAO and Psy.

The first mashup I remember listening to was the Eminem/Britney Spears mashup (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j98zaF5592c). It was particularly funny because Eminem had recently dissed Britney Spears, but the ironic thing is that this mashup sounded better than the originals of both songs.

The only question I have is how do these mashup-er's isolate the vocals and instrumentals so clearly? Are the vocal and instrumental tracks available for most songs these days, so that fans can create mashups?

There are some neat tricks you can do with the 2 stereo signals. Linear combinatios of L/R channels is the easiest, but doesn't work well with modern mixes where bass/snare/voice is centered and other instruments are rarely ever hard-panned (you can get really cool results on some older albums like Rubber Soul - there's a lot of hard panning going on there)

There are of cuorse more advanced techniques for isolation of centered tracks and vocals in particular see http://virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=102 and http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/1499/how-to-extract-v...

If you find the right mix of David Bowie's Space Oddity (one with hard panning), playing one channel makes it sound like THE worst garageband Bowie cover ever.

The high hat is high on the mix, you can barely hear the orchestra, and only one of Bowie's audio tracks is on it, so it is really discordant.

It makes my skin crawl, but I love it.

One of the secrets is Rock Band et al. These games often have the original music remixed with isolated tracks for the various "instruments," vocals included. There are ways to set up a Rock Band session so the end result is just a single track playing in isolation, which can then be captured as source material for tools like Ableton.

Thank you. :)

Stores like iTunes often carry instrumentals, at least for the singles. There's also acapellas4u.co.uk and Beatport for finding acapellas.

Very cool mashup. Can you give more than technical details of how you made it? Logic Pro and then what? Or is there a site you recommend to explain how to make mashups? I always assumed it was something mere mortals can't do.

I prefer Logic Pro because it's (to me) the most straightforward, but you can use Ableton or Reason or whatever; all the DAW (digital audio workstation) apps are basically the same.

Of all the EDM I've tried to make - dubstep, drum/bass, house, trance, chillwave - mashups seem to be the easiest, because you start out with all the ingredients.

Find some instrumental tracks and a few a capellas. You'll want them to have similar keys, so they don't clash when you hear them (my mashup suffers from this in a few places), which can be tough, and pitch-shifting won't necessarily get you there. You also have to beat match everything, which means adjusting the tempos of the a capellas so they match your music track. Easiest way to do this is to find a BPM tapper and tap out the BPM for your song and your a capella, and plug those numbers into your DAW's tempo changer. If it's not perfect, you'll just have to slice the track during gaps so that major vocal cues land on specific beats.

After that, you just have to sequence everything together so it sounds good. In a mashup, this means making the lyrics and the music mesh well, and having hooks that throw your audience off guard. For example, in my mashup, my favorite part is the transition into the Offspring song because it just flows so well ("uno dos tres quatro cinco cinco seis" "let's go" "you know it's kind of...") and it's unexpected. Balance the lyrics so that one thing is being said/sung at a time.

Overall, just make it fun. A mashup is supposed to be a unique spin on other songs. Mix things up, and keep it interesting.

my mashup suffers from this in a few places

No. Not to this unexposed ear. I detest bad mashups, but if there are audio flaws in this one, you've concealed them very well indeed. I'm floored.

This makes me want to get on with my own back-burner electronic music notions.

Agreed. The end of the Bloodhound Gang section is slightly discordant, but I felt that it had an interesting sound and lead well into the final section. Great work.

The Bloodhound Gang's chorus is probably the worst part of it, and is probably primarily what the OP was referring to, though the rapping verses work reasonably well. That said, it was still great overall.

Years ago, Acid (I forget who made it) used to have great features for beatmatching tracks and pitch shifting. It wasn't the best DAW by any means but it seemed to have been designed for making mashups.

Acid was pretty ground-breaking at the time it came out, I think a lot of beat-matching features in modern DAWs was inspired by what Acid did. It was made buy Sonic Foundry who then sold it to Sony - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/acidsoftware

I have an unusual amount of knowledge about Acid since a friend of mine originally created it (he left Sonic Foundry to work on audio software at Apple the last time I talked to him) and I used it to produce two albums back in the day.

For a lot of songs (and most popular new songs), you can download the "instrumental" version and the "acapella" version, the latter being the isolated vocal track. Most mashup-ers use these, as opposed to doing it themselves (which would lead to muddy/mismatched music).

How very cool of LMFAO and PSY to celebrate rather than quash his creation.

I was stunned. I never expected that to happen. It was a great honor.

(It was also a little ironic, as there's a copyright dispute on the video coming from LMFAO's label.)

Right! I was pretty surprised by that! Hopefully YouTube doesn't pull the video ;)

Well done and fair play Steve..

"Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea's Music Video Sensation"

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/gan...

"5 Must-See ‘Gangnam Style’ Response Videos"

http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2012/08/22/5-must-see-gangnam-sty...

"KnowYourMeme: Gangnam Style"

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gangnam-style

+ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424920

Wow, great job! For me, it's the video that hooked me. I see the OP and comments focusing around the audio mashup, which is really good. But, the video is what gives the mashup viral legs.

Without the high quality and polished video, there is no LMFAO tweet. There's no buzzfeed. There is no radio airplay. Without the video, the song is confined to SoundCloud and small audiences.

The probable virality of Steve's song increased exponentially because of the video. The video is what is being linked to, around the web. From forums, to feeds, to tweets, to DJs.

So to Steve, I say thank you for the video. The effort you made in making a front end to your song made me watch it again and again. The polish of your video gave me the desire and confidence to share it with my friends. The video is the reason I downloaded your MP3 and M4A versions, and will be enjoying this song for a long time. (thanks for that).

In conclusion: because the backend (audio mashup) is well engineered, it has the potential to scale. Without the frontend (video), the backend goes unnoticed by the masses, save for a few backend junkies. The magic happens because the high quality frontend (video) gives the engineered-to-scale backend (audio mashup) a linkable, shareable, visual interface.

Great job! Great lesson! Hope you do more!

I have to be sincere: I don't like at all modern electronic pop music like LMFAO or PSY. I think that most of these songs rely too much on easy rythms and electronic resources to supply what they can't do with other musical resources.

But, God, you have made such a great work. Both the music and the video. I really love how you're able to combine different songs to create another one and not just throwing random parts of songs together. Great work, congratulations.

By the way, listening to this I remembered Andy Rehfeldt work, who re-records songs changing completely the style. For example, the famous Call Me Maybe in metal version [1] or Metallica playing smooth jazz [2].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWJ9YaTmoyg [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBmM79YadYM

I'm one of those people who never quite figured out what Twitter is for, so it's surprising to realize that this probably wouldn't have risen to the original artists' attention via the channels we had before. And now I'm hoping Streza might see the crowd get into this at jwz's club some saturday.

And again: "Unfortunately, this UMG-music-content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights."

Good to have a proxy around.

I went through YouTube's copyright dispute process, and said it was a fair use derivative work. YouTube's response is apparently to ask the copyright owner if they feel it's fair use. Which, of course, they didn't.

Ironically, it was LMFAO's label that had the problem, and yet LMFAO posted the song to their Facebook and Twitter profiles. C'est la vie.

The original PSY Gangnam style video is blocked in Germany, so I don't think your dispute will have any effect. Can you make it available for download? I would really like to see (and hear) it.

I saw you made the audio available for download. Good stuff, thanks a lot, I enjoyed it.

Out of curiosity, what do you feel qualifies it as fair use? That's a fairly specific doctrine (in the US, at least).

Courts have ruled remixes/mashups like this one are fair use.

What cases are you talking about when you say "like this one"? There absolutely is no statutory fair use protection for mashups in the general case, and I'd be shocked if the case law is anything but subjective.

Honestly I don't get the deal with Germany forbidding access to so many youtube videos. I've been there on vacation a few times and it was nearly impossible to find some (legitimate uploaded) songs in youtube, even from the VEVO channel. Big thumbs down for GEMA.

Their policy (verbatim):

"Whoever wants to playback or perform music in public in Germany will become, as a rule by doing this, a customer of GEMA."

Translation: "We don't give a damn about you being the owner of your creations or if you want to use non-restrictive licenses (CC for instance), you'll give us money whether you like it or not"

Yes, especially with a population of over one fourth of the US and internet penetration of roughly 80% (most of it broadband) one might think Germany is a big enough advertising market for the right holders to pressure the GEMA.

"Try something that scares the hell out of you. It just might turn into something wonderful."

Wise words, indeed.

The scary part wasn't necessary to experience something wonderful.

I am producing electronic music myself. These days, where the internet is mainstream I don't dare posting anything online.

About 9 years ago, things were different. I was a 15 year old kid and enjoyed producing trance music. My setup was extremely primitive and my music in a way, too.

But I managed to make those tracks sound quite euphoric.

Then (that's how I actually learnt HTML & CSS) I set up my own webpage and put that stuff out there. (later, that project turne into a little net-lable where 4 people were posting their music for free and we started doing remixes for one another)

To my surprise, quite some people were downloading my songs. Some even burnt them onto CDs and listened to them in their cars. (Back then, internet-browsing and recordable discs weren't exactly cheap. So in a way, they were paying for my music!)

The "highlight" was when a DJ from a big Ukrainian radio station played the tracks in his show & on one of his gigs. Some of the listeners posted positive feedback on that station's website.

Perhaps, programming turned me a little paranoid, but today I am quite scared of what could potentially be done with every bit of information you put online. It is true that wonderful things can happen, but (unknown) dangers aren't to be underestimated.

"And the most astonishing thing to me? The mashup itself is catchy, but it's far from being technically great."

It's a musical MVP!

Im a 40yo grumpy middle aged man, who still clings on to some very old music. I have to say, I like what you've done there.

I love listening to music from the 60s. The 1760s, that is.

(joke stolen from GTA, but it's true)

A great candid story of his experience going viral. Could be a little more concise, but still congrats to the guy for stepping up to the plate and crushing it out of the park. So what if it wasn't a technical masterpiece. If he was only intending for this to be a learning experience, I think he should be totally satisfied.

Absolutely satisfied with the response. Learned a lot from this, next time around the technicals should be much tighter (I hope).

No! Well, sure, there's nothing wrong with technical excellence. But the thing to do is try to understand why this mashup succeed and do more of that.

I know very little about music, but I think the editorial choices are what matter most in a mashup. It was almost like the other artists were debating the merits of this new song. As long as you hit the "technically good enough" threshold, the fact that you've got PSY dancing to "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" is going to matter a lot more.

For me, the key parts of its success to emulate are:

- capitalizing on a meme at the peak of its popularity

- combining popular (LMFAO) with nostalgic (Offspring/Bloodhound Gang)

- catchy beat

- using the songs to differentiate the story (Offspring singing about the guy that thinks he has style, while showing the yellow-suited dancer)

- healthy mix of original song and mash-ins (keep the verse to one song intact, but layer the chorus)

I wish this comment could be higher. The next iteration shouldn't be about technical excellence (that will come naturally), but rather about audience and artistic desires (it's a mix with art; with business, it would be all customer)..

Unfortunately the video mashup has been removed. Youtube message is: "Like A Bad Guy Party..." - This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by YG Entertainment Inc.

Fortunately the audio is still available for download: https://s3.amazonaws.com/gangnam-style-mashup/Like_A_Bad_Whi...

It is a remix mashup of the songs: Gangnam Style by PSY (featuring HyunA), Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO, Like a G6 by Far East Movement (ft. Dev and The Catracs), Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) by The Offspring and Bad Touch by the Bloodhound Gang.

Fortunately someone made a copy of the video mashup and it can be seen here now: http://www.videobash.com/video_show/like-a-bad-white-guy-par...

Such a shame :(

"Like A Bad White Guy Party ..." This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by YG Entertainment Inc.. Sorry about that.

I don't know what it is but the font on this site looks really bad in my browser.

Yet another reason I block everyone's webfonts.

(Designers on OS X: ClearType does not render fonts the same way.)

That seems excessive, perhaps just upgrade to a more progressive font-smoothing algorithm? ClearType is built for lo-res displays (it snaps pixels to a grid rather than smoothing), so as you'd expect it looks like utter crap on a nice monitor. I have heard good things about gditray:

http://www.cobyx.com/software/gdi/

Have to design for the lowest common denominator. Just because you and I can install gditray or whatnot doesn't mean that most people will.

Edit: The link even says that it doesn't work with Chrome, so it's still a non-starter.

Chrome should have DirectWrite rendering soon: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...

Is there an easy way to detect when type is rendered with ClearText?

This article explains and provides an implementation to do that: http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2009/11/29/how-to-detect-fo...

Most webfonts look OK on windows vista and up.

This is probably the 4th or 5th link this week that has been barely legible (windows 7/chrome). Note to blog authors who want to use custom webfonts: If you are not testing on non-IE windows, you could be alienating a very large percentage of your potential readerbase.

TypeKit (I don't know the name of the font). It looks fine on IE9. DRM'ed webfonts look like crap on all other browsers on Windows.

Yep. Chrome on Windows 7 looks awful.

The digits are especially confusing - the 4's render like European 1's.

What's the difference between European and non-European 1's?

Americans either write a single vertical stroke or an upward hook with a horizontal base line. Europeans (well, Germans and Hungarians to my own knowledge) write just the upward hook - to distinguish this from a 7, they cross the seven.

This font rendered fours (Chrome on Win 7) without the horizontal bar, leaving something that looked like a 1, to me.

Great job on the mixes. Next step is to try to exactly recreate the song without using samples, or try live mixing using hardware controllers and soft players.

Yikes, I feel like the last person to hear about PSY and Gangnam Style - great song! 126mil views (original), wow.

Edit: the mashup ruled. More plz

Thank you. :)

Thanks for sharing. That's awesome! I was dreading hearing that they made you take the vid down. Nice.

The only technical glitch I minded was at 1:10. Psy's on screen just long enough to open his mouth without any words playing. But I'm a musician and this is a nit. But if you re-edit this ever just thought I'd add this.

Yeah, I'd thought about maybe doing a re-cut. But it's kind of late now. I couldn't replace the existing video, so it'd have to be separate, and nobody would find it. Oh well. Lesson learned for next time!

good job on the mashup, even I like it. Wish you could hear it through my ears, it sounds really good.

Thank you! :)

There have been an awful lot of PSY mashups in the last two weeks. If you want to hear more, here is a playlist of some of the most notable mashups, as upvoted by the Reddit /r/mashups community: http://muxamp.com/848

I had to open up a new tab, to come back to hackernews because I didnt want the song to stop.

I love stories like this. Great work, and I hope you keep on making more music!

I saw this one recently - pretty good.

"DJ Earworm Mashup - United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom)": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ail7D_k0s9w

I'm glad somebody mentioned this, because World Go Boom was the first thing I thought of when we started a discussion about mashups. DJ Earworm is a master of the art.

And currently at least, you also hit #1 story on the front page of HN. Not too bad at all for an experiement hehe :)

This is really awesome and well made, nice job and congratulations on the success, you deserve it!

For the love of Pete enable mobile viewing!

No And Then!!!! (dude where's my car)

"Try something that scares the hell out of you. It just might turn into something wonderful."

I'd loved the mashup. However, if spending a weekend making a mashup scares the hell out of you, you must be living a very sheltered life. Here are some things that scare the hell out of me (and I have no intention of trying):

- Climbing Everest

- Wingsuit base jumping

- Armed combat

I'll leave it at that, you get the point.

Edit: and you are too scared to offer a counterpoint, so you anonymously downvote instead :)

As making music has been a dream of mine for most of my life, and I had no actual barometer of skill besides personal preference, you bet your ass that it was terrifying.

People like you are why I actively avoid comment threads on Hacker News.

"People like you are why I actively avoid comment threads on Hacker News."

That's just a gratuitous ad-hominem.

If you are terrified by the thought of putting your work out there for others to judge, I suggest that you work on that problem.

That's not an ad-hominem because he wasn't using it to support another point. He has every right to avoid being around negativeness. If you think that this attitude isn't doing him any good, that's also YOUR opinion and he has every right to disagree without being accused of a non-existent logical fallacy.

Maybe it's not the making the mashup that's scary but sharing something you're not experienced at and not very confident in with THE ENTIRE world that he may have found scary. I know I would have.

You just shared a comment with THE ENTIRE world. For all you know, it could be picked up by this Twitter account that has 7k followers:

https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says

Is it that scary to post your work on the internet? Imagine that you were drafted to go fight in a war with a 30% chance of dying tomorrow. Could you still consider posting a mashup scary?

> You just shared a comment with THE ENTIRE world. For all you know, it could be picked up by this Twitter account that has 7k followers

Myself included. It's a great account.

That said, commenting and participating in a public forum is something I've done for a long time and which I'm comfortable with. This is Steve's first attempt at a mashup. Things are far scarier the first time around.

Also, scary doesn't have to be relative. Sure, going and fighting a war is something most people would find scary. A lot of people would feel the same way about walking down a strange dark alley. Are an active war zone and a poorly-lit space AT ALL similar? No. Yet they're both scary. Others still find meeting new people scary. That doesn't mean that they have "thin skin" or that they live a "sheltered life".

Scary is subjective, not objective, and you don't get to be the person who chooses what other people are and aren't wary of.

> Could you still consider posting a mashup scary?

Phobias, shyness, etc. don't go away just because you did something else scary. I know at least one soldier who's been through Iraq who still finds spiders terrifying.

Not sure why you've being downvoted, you actually have a good point!

I couldn't disagree more with parent's opinion: I don't consider 'scariness' to be transitive in this context (see related comment of soldier being afraid of spiders) and the tone seems arrogant and "look at me, I'm an overachiever" to me.

HOWEVER, one's agreeing or disagreeing SHOULD NOT determine a vote (so, doesn't matter if he has a 'good point' or not). The people who have the karma to downvote (I don't) should swallow it up if they strongly disagree with the comment, but can't justify why the opinion can't be said.

TL;DR; one shouldn't downvote because of opinion, no matter how nocive or negative one might find it.

This makes for a pretty easy downvote:

Edit: and you are too scared to offer a counterpoint, so you anonymously downvote instead :)

True, but he wouldn't have edited this in if he had not been downvoted first. But I do agree that the bullying and the sarcasm were unecessary and somewhat justified the downvotes.

I guess some people on Hacker News don't have a thick skin. Some are actually scared of things that seem trivial to me, like writing a blog post and submitting it. They don't like being called on it. Oh, well.

WRT edit: I think the downvote-capable readers are being harsher on belittling or sarcastic comments across the board, lately.

Would you say that's a bad thing, though?

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