Remix Radiohead's 'Nude' yourself - or, how to listen to one song over and over and not get bored
You may have read that Radiohead have broken their current single 'Nude' into its constituent parts and allowed people to download these "stems" so they can make their own remixes. They're all up on iTunes (cannily priced at 79p each or £3.95 the lot).
The band have also put up a special site hosting the mixes, where you can hear them and vote for the best ones. It's surprisingly entertaining, particularly Amplive's brilliant hip hop version. No doubt someone somewhere is diligently capturing all the streams and a BitTorrent of all of them will appear somewhere soon.
Meanwhile, the separated tracks for Bohemian Rhapsody and Marvin Gaye's Ain't No Mountain High Enough are now floating around the internet, and more are sure to leak soon. Are we entering an era when no song is ever "finished" and the punter's take on it is as valid as the artist's?
- More from Andrew Harrison.
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Oh god forbid
it all ends up like George Lucas's endless tinkering with the Star Wars films, gradually stripping things of novelty, charm and personality until they just end up over worked and rubbish.
I couldn't agree more.
In Radiohead's case, they start out overworked and rubbish, but that's no reason to encourage bu**ering about with anyone else's work.
Won't it go in the other direction, though?
The Star Wars prequels are rubbish because George Lucas had a fatal combination of infinite money and no ideas at all. If he'd opened them up to new people with new ideas - and a limited budget -Â you might have got something as truly artistically amazing as the first Star Wars movies.
I must admit I quite like the idea of turning piece of popular music into standards to be reworked over and over by different hands. Isn't this what happened to folk music years ago? Nobody accuses that of lacking novelty, charm or personality (well, nobody except me, but I'm just a biased and lonely voice here in the ongoing village fête that is THE WORD).
Folk songs
got re-interpreted and re-played and re-sung and re-arranged and so on, but this is just re-mixing what's been done, not re-doing it from scratch, isn't it?
You can add new elements, change the existing ones, re-edit it.
In certain respects it's more creative than practising endlessly to reproduce a song perfectly in a particular artist or tradition's style. So in a real sense, it IS re-interpretation and re-arrangement - and sometimes re-singing and re-playing too.
Picking apart
As I mentioned the other time this was discussed, Radiohead are by no means the first people to do this sort of thing. Sometimes it's just interesting to listen to the separate elements that make up a track rather than mess around with them necessarily.
As has been pointed out, a lot of the remixes aren't that great but I rather liked the remix of "Shock the Monkey" that won a competition on the Real World Remixed site. Here's a link to hear it.
I suspect...
That in this case 95% of what's created will be absolute bobbins, but 5% will be fantastic. And this doesn't matter - the beauty of the Internet is that you won't ever have to sift through the crap, because other people will filter everything for you. The cream will rise, as if by magic.
Going a little bit off piste
but do you seem to have blanked out the memory of the 'Special Editions' where he re-edited scenes, plastered new special effects in and - crime of crimes - changed the end to Return Of The Jedi.
Back to the thread - is this actually a slightly more modern version of Sniffing Glue printing three guitar chords and telling The Kids to get on with it themselves?
There's a reason why I blanked the memory.
Start with Greedo missing Han Solo despite shooting from a distance of two feet and go from there.
I bet if Lucas had freed up the "constituent parts" of A New Hope, you'd have got something a lot more interesting than dozens of CGI monsters filling every corner of the screen.
Quote: 'The ongoing village fête that is THE WORD'
'Oh look, there's young Mr. Ellen setting up his Flower(ed Up) stall, and Mr Lewry getting ready for the Tom(Waits)bola. And isn't that Mr. Hepworth? What's he doing? Ooooh, guess the remixes on the extra CD, my favourite. No bearded lady this year? Shame.'
Tee hee.
Not sure about this edit lark, but that may be 'cos Radiohead are doing it. The thought of thousands of different versions of Oxbridge angst floating through the ether fills me with dread, but then, I don't have to listen to them, do I?
So I think I'm with Andrew; if the cream of the crop becomes accessible, we could all benefit.
Young people today
I was never one of those kids who was embarassed by their parents - quite the contrary, they were the people who introduced me to Count Basie, Jimmy Shand, Nellie Lutcher, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller and many more. But thank you, Andrew, for the dubious pleasure of demonstrating, years after its demise as a popular phrase, that the "generation gap" actually exists.
Wasn't this the principal behind mashups?
It's almost like official 'bootleg' remixing. Reverse engineering (I don't know the mechanics), and hard pan left and right gave remixers the tools needed to strip out component parts and stitch the seperate tracks together in allsorts of bespoke bootlegs.
Should be interesting to hear the results though.
Certainly is.
I like the idea of big bands not only endorsing it but giving it a platform.
I read this immediately after Oeufmans post
and thought you meant Big bands, as opposed to big bands,having visions of Basie being mixed and mashed.
How..
did this blog article jump to the top of the list again?
Using
Web Magic
It's been inhaling helium.
.
Ha Ha
- do you do podcast magic too? See my blog entry (now beneath andrew's blog entry!!). I could do with a wand waving over my techy troubles.
I saw that
I would guess it's something to do with the sampling rate, and that the Archos is getting confused by the lower number, although it really shouldn't. Have you tried asking in the Archos Forums? There might be someone else there who has run into similar issues...
Instant new hobby
Twenty minutes ago I found a track we all know and love, opened it up in a multitrack editor and did a 30-second tweak to kill the vocals and the most characteristic instrumentation. Can you recognise it? (Most of you should get it as soon as the horns come in after 30 seconds or so.)
Dangerously fun, this is, Mr Harrison. Mrs V might have to have words.
It's, er, Wonderful!
More please! Now what it REALLY needs is a proper MC...
Tweaks?
So what are these magical tweaks that enable this sort of thing? Ive got various bits of audio software and I'm itching to have a twiddle for myself!
Tweaking and twiddling
You find the packs of .wav files (as .rar files mostly), er, where you can, then open them up in a multitrack editor. I used Adobe Audition but I imagine any sequencing or home-studio software that can handle audio files (Cubase, Logic, Reason, etc.) will work too. Then just mute the tracks you don't want, arrange the ones you do want around the stereo field and bingo. The ones I've posted have all been dry - I haven't even started to play with EQ or other bags of effects tricks yet.
I don't think it's natural to play around with these things,
it's the Devil's work. Sorry, but that's just what I believe.
Revealing the abject clunkiness. . .
of Captain Sixpence's interactions with his trusty Stickybackplastocaster isn't the Devil's work; it's a service to humanity, surely.
Seriously, though, I know what you mean, but I do think they're of interest in much the same way as a "Making of..." documentary of a classic fillum is of interest - in an "ah, so that's how they did it" sort of way. Stripping songs down to their components also highlights the gestaltitude (Best check that one in dic - Ed.) of many classic tracks: the sum of the parts turns out to be only a pale imitation of the "definitive" end result that we've come to know and love. (I'm refraining from doing anything with Marvin Gaye's "...Grapevine", which I found this morning, because it sounds shockingly shoddy when stripped apart to its bare essentials. Definitely a case where it's best not to look up the magician's sleeve so that the illusion can remain unshattered.)
I see...
So the answer is basically "you find the mastertapes somewhere". I thought you were practising some form of devildom to extract such mixes from a finished audio file. Ah well, off to sniff out some torrents, I suppose...
And another one
Here's an unplugged version of a well-known hit - just bass, bongos and acoustic guitars (the electric guitar riff would have been a dead giveaway). I bring in the backing vocals after about 25 seconds, by which time all should become clear.
Nice
I reckon you could do a seamless mashup with Dolly Parton's Jolene if you could isolate the vocal from that song.
The Law of Mashups
The better you think your idea for a mashup is, the more incompatible the keys of the two tracks will inevitably turn out to be.
I tried. It's a no-no (after pitchshifting, Dolly sounds even more like she's on helium than she does usually).
Ah well
Thanks for trying. The idea will just have to live on in my mind.
I nominate the a cappella of 'Follow The Leader' by
Eric B and Rakim. I might see if I can find it tonight and stick it on the board for you.
I can't resist
Going into web 2.0 management speak for a little bit.... it strikes me that this is just the periphery of a global trend.
In the business world companies are just starting to understand the benefits of opening up their doors to all sorts of collaborative endeavours. An oil company offered prizes for anyone who could take their prospecting data from the web and actually find oil.
Isn't this an extension of that idea, open your doors, give out some raw data, offer a prize for the best, and let anyone with the endeavour to come up with a solution.
Wikipedia and the Word blog work on a similar principal; collaboration enabled by the web produces an enhanced experience and commitment from everyone who mucks in. A great book came out last year called Wikinomics - byline 'How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything' it makes you think what will be possible in the not so far off future.
The Radiohead comp has got to be the natural progression from MP3; something that gets us closer, more engaged and interested in the band. Mucking in doing the remixes and voting is fun isn't it? Although I think having to pay for the stem is a step too far! The theory is it should produce a closer relationship with the fans and a great remix...which they could, I suppose, sell.
phew
Cruel? Moi?
Here's one of Brian "Captain Sixpence" May's best-known solos in all its naked, er, glory (followed by some rather fun bits of massed Freddies, with a drop of bass thrown in just to keep it flowing).
Now that's
Just plain weird.
Guaranteed to blow your mind
If Brian May doesn't exactly benefit from raw exposure, Freddie Mercury certainly does. If we lose everything except the vocals and harmonies, there's some very tight, proper Brian-Wilson-Nods-In-Approval singing going on here (the scoop-up at about 18 seconds is ourageously well done):
Technically the best singer in rock? On the strength of this, I think he probably was, and I wouldn't describe myself as a Queen fan by any means. Did they have an arranger or did he write the harmony parts himself? Anyone know?
Out
Freddie Standing.
Scanty Dread
Here's a drop of Bob Marley without any organ, piano or trademark Les Pauls going chacka-chacka. The difference is quite. . . well, best just give it a listen.
Streaming
Any idea why the Divshare streaming is so stop/start? You Tube too. Is it my browser (Firefox)? Or t'other end.
It sometimes happens to me too
I've found a trick is to pause it and wait a minute or so for the progress bar to shift a bit. If you hit play then it usually stops staggering.