Songs and Sonics

Four months ago, I announced a remix contest for my song Really Really Weird. The original multitracks were put online, and I encouraged remixers to mangle things to their heart’s content.

The entry ranked the highest by a panel of seven judges and myself would win the grand prize — one of the keyboards I used on the song, a circuit-bent Casio SK-1. Three runner-ups would win a Girls Aliens Food CD and a Girls Aliens Food t-shirt.

Well, something kind of funny happened along the way. Y’see, there were a lot of interesting remixes, and there was at least one thing I liked about each remix. So everybody who submitted a remix — but who didn’t end up in the top four slots — was given a free digital download of the Girls Aliens Food album.

Thanks to the judges (Mathieu Bournazel, Rob Gibson, Pea Hix, Missy Kulik & Raoul De La Cruz, Mike Langlie, and Matt Williams) and to everyone who sent in their mixes. It was fun to hear new interpretations of a song that I was very familiar with; hope everyone else had fun too.

So without further ado — the remixes!

And everyone else… (Don’t let the fact they don’t have a contest ranking next to their name throw you — there’s some good stuff in here!)

Note to podcasters: All of these tracks are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you’re free to use them in your podcast as long as you give proper credit.

Just wanted to let you know that there will be fewer updates on Songs and Sonics for the next month or so.

No, I haven’t lost interest in blogging — in fact, I’m working on some extremely cool things that I can’t wait to tell you about.

What’s going on is, well, I’ve got this little debut album called Girls Aliens Food which will be released on October 1st. My internet time is being (happily) sucked up by getting things in place for the release and interacting with the radio/podcast/press people who will hopefully spread the word about the album.

I’ll be updating The Simple Carnival’s MySpace page, MySpace blog, and web site often, since that’s where my attention will be. Also, the Really Really Weird remix contest is in full swing (you can check out the latest entries here).

But I’m not going to let Songs and Sonics rot. It’s just going to take a short nap. It’ll be back — with a vengeance — when things are a little less busy around the Boller household.

If you want to be updated when something new is posted here, please sign up for the mailing list (look in the right hand column — you might need to scroll down to see it).

In the meantime, thank you for your patience… And don’t forget to order your very own personally autographed copy of Girls Aliens Food! (Sorry — I’m permanently stuck in marketing mode this month…)

Well, it’s taken multiple crazy web server issues and wild goose chases to locate old backup DVDs, but it’s finally here — the Really Really Weird Remix Contest!

Almost everything you need to know about the contest can be found on this page:

Note that there are some new tidbits on that page, like what criteria will be used for judging your remix. And here’s where you can download the raw multitracks.

However… once you download the tracks, there’s some additional information you ought to know about the tracks themselves.

The files that are part of the second mix have the prefix “midsection_”. It’s recommended that, at least until you’re familiar with the tracks, you make two different mix sessions and work with each half separately.

In the Girls Aliens Food version of the song, the main song mix is interrupted at around the 2:57 mark with the midsection mix. When the midsection mix ends, the song cuts back into the main song mix, at the main song mix’s 3:17 mark.

The “door slam” file is tacked on to the ending of the album mix. The door slam is not meant to go at the beginning of the mix, as it would be if you imported all of these tracks into a DAW; it’s meant to be inserted wherever the song ends.

Naturally, you are not expected to stay true to the original mix (in fact, it is encouraged that you don’t) — but this information is meant to help make sense of how the tracks were constructed, should you want to use the original mix structure as a starting point.

Most of the tracks are mono, though a few are in stereo. The tracks in stereo are marked with the word “(stereo)” at the end of the name.

What is the BPM for this song? Good question. The Me and My Arrow EP and Girls Aliens Food album are the first Simple Carnival releases where I used a click track. However, I didn’t want to make things sound too slick — I wanted to keep a connection with the lo-fi sound that was established with the previous EPs. So I varied the tempo of the click track very, very slightly, speeding up or slowing down things in the way a conductor might lead an orchestra.

So what does this mean?

It means your job as a remixer just got a lot trickier. Although these tracks line up with one another in a DAW, they don’t collectively line up with a steady tempo grid. And I have been unable to locate the original Pro Tools session that I used for recording the song, so I can’t tell you the initial BPM. By the time I imported the tracks into Reaper for mixing, I paid no attention to the BPM or grid anyway.

If you have any questions about the files, please post them as a comments on the Really Really Weird Remix Contest page or as a comment at the bottom of this post.

Good luck with your remix!