In a brief but impressive career, Sean Kingston has always had a knack for creating amazing hooks. At 17, he released the Ben-E.-King-inspired “Beautiful Girls”, somehow managing to sing about suicidal thoughts without losing his trademark smile. This was followed up with “Me Love”, a twist on Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Maker”, and “Take You There”, which pointed towards a more electronic futuristic sound. By the time he released this summer’s inescapable euro-flavored infectious dance hit “Fire Burning”, the sound had gone fully electronic, while remaining as catchy as ever.
So when his label approached me about mashing up his greatest hits, I knew I had all the raw material I would need to make an ultra hook-y mashup. And finding the actual words “mash up” in “Beautiful Girls” was just icing on the cake.
I mixed up these four hits, along with “I Can Feel It” from his last album “Sean Kingston”, and bits of “Tomorrow” and “Face Drop” from his upcoming album “Tomorrow”.
And I made a video for it as well!
To view the video in full screen, click
HERE.
Download the full version
here.
I also made a shorter radio edit of this mashup which you can download
here.
I’ve always held a deep respect for Annie Lennox and her music, so when she gave me her multi-track masters to mash up, I was thrilled. The task was to tie together all of her solo career into single song and video, and I could deconstruct it as much as I wanted! Woohoo!
Her music expresses much hardship and sadness, but also defiance, joy and triumph, and I wanted the mashup to reflect that journey. Here’s the tracklist:
- Why
- Walking on Broken Glass
- Little Bird
- No More I Love You’s
- Waiting in Vain
- Something So Right
- Dark Road
- Sing
- Shining Light
To listen to the streaming audio, click
HEREAnd here’s the video for it:
To view the video in full screen, click
HERE.
- Kelly Clarkson - My Life Would Suck Without You
- Coldplay - In My Place
Coldplay’s “In My Place” reveals the power ballad lurking within Kelly’s recent hit.
To view the video in full screen, click
HERE.
- The Fray - Heartless (Kanye West Cover)
- Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow
- The Police - Message in a Bottle
- 2Pac - Dear Mama
- Alan Parsons Project - Ammonia Avenue
When I heard The Fray performing this beautiful cover of Kanye’s “Heartless” on BBC’s Radio 1, it really seemed to capture the song’s melancholy feeling. The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” also fit the mood, and for the beat I used a sloooowwwed down “Boom Boom Pow”, the Black Eyed Peas’ inescapable hit.
Kanye based his original “Heartless” on a sample by the Alan Parsons Project, “Ammonia Avenue”, so I grabbed that sample, and also added a little bit of 2Pac’s “Dear Mama”, where he talks about being “heartless”.
And here’s the video for it:
To view the video in full screen, click
HERE.
An even higher quality version can be seen on Facebook
HERE.
Maroon 5 recently released a remix album entitled Call and Response, where they got various of remixers to radically re-interpret their greatest hits. I commend them on their spirit of experimentation, especially since they opened up their entire archive for me to destroy interpret! I basically had the Pro Tools digital recording sessions for all their songs, so I could go in and grab whatever instrument or vocal I wanted. This is the first time I’ve gotten such a depth of data to work with.
As I picked apart the recording sessions, the thing that really stood out to me was the level of musicianship buried in the many layers. What sounded like a simple guitar riff was actually made up of many guitars, carefully layered and ordered to get just the right tone. Background vocals revealed themselves to be beautiful melodies in their own right.
Club Mix
This version has an electro house club feel.. I added some guitars from “Goodnight Goodnight”, “This Love”, and “Makes Me Wonder”, and brought in the piano from “She Will be Loved”. Other little bits from other M5 songs are found scattered in there. Click on the buttons to the right for a radio/ipod-friendly version, and for the DJs, here’s an extended version.
Well it’s that time of the year again and I thought I’d do another year-end mashup. Here are bits of the Top 25 hits of the year, according to Billboard Magazine, arranged into a four and a half minute song. This is a follow-up to last year’s
mashup of the Top 25 hits of 2007.
This year in the charts, we’ve gone all soft. The songs are sexy and defiant, less macho than in previous years. Accordingly, I’ve selected Coldplay as the instrumental track, giving the whole year a sort of symphonic feel. This edit is called “Viva La Pop”, and I hope to post more edits soon.
- Flo Rida Featuring T-Pain - Low
- Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
- Alicia Keys - No One
- Lil Wayne Featuring Static Major - Lollipop
- Timbaland Featuring OneRepublic - Apologize
- Jordin Sparks Duet With Chris Brown - No Air
- Sara Bareilles - Love Song
- Usher Featuring Young Jeezy - Love in This Club
- Chris Brown - With You
- Chris Brown - Forever
- Ray J & Yung Berg - Sexy Can I
- Rihanna - Take a Bow
- Coldplay - Viva La Vida
- Katy Perry - I Kissed a Girl
- T.I. - Whatever You Like
- Rihanna - Disturbia
- Rihanna - Don’t Stop the Music
- Natasha Bedingfield - Pocketful of Sunshine
- Chris Brown Featuring T-Pain - Kiss Kiss
- Ne-Yo - Closer
- Colbie Caillat - Bubbly
- Mariah Carey - Touch My Body
- Madonna Featuring Justin Timberlake - 4 Minutes
- Pink - So What
- Finger Eleven - Paralyzer
I made a video for it, in YouTube’s fancy wide screen format
To view the video in full screen, click
HERE.
You can also view a very high quality version
HERE on Facebook.
If you liked this mashup, make sure to check out
No More Gas, which mashes up a bunch of recent hits.
Earworm on Facebook
Come join me on Facebook.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of videos, and the playback quality is outstanding.
- Kanye West - Love Lockdown
- Radiohead - Reckoner
Both Kanye West and Radiohead are participating in a long overdue trend that seems to now be emerging where musical artists are beginning to release “stems” from their tracks. Until recently, a mashup or remix artist would feel lucky just to find an instrumental version or acapella (vocals only) of a favorite track. But these musical stems allow us much more control.
Most modern recordings have many tracks, usually more than ten, and sometimes more than a hundred. Each track typically represents a single recording or electronic sound. Traditionally, before all these tracks are mixed down into a final stereo mix, it is first mixed down into about four to eight separate audio files (stems). All the foreground vocals might be on one stem, all the drums on another, while the guitars and keyboards might be on yet another. When all the stems are added together, you hear the song as it was originally meant to be heard. The traditional purpose of these stems was to enable the mastering engineer to give the final mixdown just the right sound for various formats (radio or club, CD or vinyl).
Now, with DIY remix culture exploding, we sonic manipulators are growing hungry for disassembled pop music, and the music industry is beginning to see the benefit of increased exposure through releasing stems directly to the public, allowing us much greater freedom than if they had simply released the instrumentals and acapellas. Now we can choose which instruments are playing.
This new trend augers well for us in the mashup community, and I look forward to the practice expanding. Thank you Kanye, thank you Radiohead, and thanks to all the other musicians (and music execs) that are starting to see the light!
Instamatic put together the following video.
View the video in full screen
HERE.
