White Nights (musical mash-up)

[Update: This song was used for a Kankakee Public Library podcast, 28 Feb 2007]

or LISTEN >>> WHITE NIGHTS
[Archive.org details]

Technically this may not be a mashup but I don’t think Vanessa would care. I certainly don’t. It all started as a discussion over email. I asked Vanessa if she was interested in collaborating on a musical project. “Sure,” she said.

So I recorded these tracks and emailed her the MP3 files (and informed her about the all-important Beat-per-second setting, which was at 97). You can listen to the guitar tracks here; view the CCmixter record.

In addition, I also recorded the melody with the piano and synths, as well as a “live” guitar track. I added a generic rock drum track, converted the entire song to MP3 and emailed to Vanessa.

She listened to them and decided they needed a pop-sounding bass and percussion. She made her recording and emailed me, as n MP4 file, her version of the Introduction (I’ve uploaded a MP3 version here).

I imported her MP4 file (shown as the tracks in orange in the GarageBand screenshot below), deleted the generic rock drum tracks, and then adjusted the guitar/ piano/ synths tracks to fit her intro. For the “chorus”, I used a mix of bass loops from GarageBand, as her intro wouldn’t have sounded right. I would’ve requested Vanessa to compose her version but she was tied up with some stuff so I went ahead and used the generic loops instead. Not too bad, but Vanessa’s bass and percussion tracks is much stronger and catchy than the generic loops.

[Click on image for larger sizes]