Sound Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for sound engineers, producers, editors, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
in this mashup I tried to combine two songs, one that is BPM 99 and one that is BPM 104, I would like to know, was this effect moderated by the slicing and placements that I made?
Maybe someone could give a more critical listen than myself and let me know what I might improve.
I'm using Bitwig.
Are there known techniques to apply to such situations
You could slice up one of the songs (Let's call that song 1 for now, and let's call the song you "Mix" into song 2). Set up a new project for your mashup. Or use the one in which you made the mashup. Then I recommend you set the BPM of the project to the BPM of song 2.
Now you can bring song 1 and 2 into your project. At this point you have to decide if you want to keep the BPM of song 1 as it is, or bring it to the BPM of song 2.
You can slice up song 1 into any musical length you want, like 1/4 (the most used one). Of course you take a slice from the point you want to start bringing in song 2. Now just put a lot of those slices one behind another and try out some nice mixing tricks like fading in song 2 while fading out song 1.
It might take some tries to get nice sounding slice lengths.
You could slice one of the songs in order to make it fit, yeah. By what I hear, you got rid of pauses and silences. That's one way to do it. Other way is to change pitch slightly of both files, so they are in closer relation tempo-wise to each other. Finally, you can mix both techniques. Basically, you shoudln't care about estabilished practices at this point and just experiment. If something works for you, it works period.
The best way is to first match the BPMs. When this is done the creativity can flow unimpaired. The best way is to increase the lowest tempo to match the highest(compress the lowest track's length). Another way is to adjust both songs to "meet in the middle". Some software's better than others for time stretching. I use Serato software when I play live, and the pitch lock sounds great.
You can find the BPM of a song by using software, or by doing some simple maths, if you know how many bars are in the track, and you know the time scale from first to last beat, then you can find the BPM.
If you still want to match one track to the other by splitting it up, split it into eights notes at least, and to save hastle, don't decrease the tempo on the split track(this will create gaps). Maybe Bitwig has a way of automating this splitting process. Remember to be precice with cutting and placement.
In the past, I would create mash-ups on my decks with just the two vinyls, using the pitch adjustment to match them. No pitch-lock, editing on-the-fly and people loved them. There is no 'wrong' way to do these things, all that matters is if you like the outcome.
