What was mixed:
song: the song was a mashup of all of the music I could find out of the different artists who performed at Pitzer’s music festival Kohoutek. In this mashup, this includes Matt & Kim, Mr Lif, Blu, The Henry Clay People, Les Blanks, Mandrill, and The Self Interest Collective.

video: artists shown in the video include Matt & Kim, Mr Lif and guests, Blu, The Henry Clay People, and one artist I couldn’t find anything about, that I believe goes by the name Random Sun Masses.

The mashup song was a lot harder than I was expecting. To make a mashup, you need songs with the same exact tempos, in keys that don’t clash, and within those songs you need to find quiet spots, or place where only one instrument, or a few unobtrusive instruments, and maybe vocals are.

This last requirement prevents most parts from most songs from being used. Mashup artists using popular mainstream songs in some ways have this a lot easier, because many hit songs are rereleased as instrumental tracks or in remixes with one isolated part.

So my first task was finding the music. I won’t go into details, but due to the smallness of many of these bands, that itself took a lot of work.

Next I went through all of the songs I had of each artist and found the “beats per minute” or tempo of the song. I then those a level of beats per minute (roughly songs with bpms of 94-104 and decided to use those as the content of the mashup. I would assume everyone recorded with a click track, but no two songs had the exact same bpm and after using different programs I found that all had bpms with a few decimal places.

After choosing the songs I would focus on, I further narrowed these down by listening through all the songs and finding “quiet places” that would be suitable for inclusion in a mashup. Many songs did not include any suitable parts, and most had only 1 usable part.

I then used Logic Pro for the mixing. I first used Logic to change the bpm of all the songs to 100. There is no simple way to do this, as programs cannot completely correctly analyze the bpm of songs, so I had to first find the bpm of the song, and then put that into logic, so it could make a relative comparison of how much faster/slower the song would need to be to be at 100 bpm. This worked pretty well, but some songs still were not exactly 100, and I had to do some further cutting and moving of individual clips to make them align with other tracks.

And it might seems obvious, but you cannot just put two tracks together and expect them to sound good. Most of what I tried was very cluttered or had clashing keys, and in the end I was very limited on what could actually possibly fit together.

Also, probably the hardest part of this was syncing two tracks together. You cannot just put any two tracks together to listen to how they would sound accompanying one another, but must make their beats perfectly match eachother. There is no easy way to do this, as most times it is quite impossible to tell from the wave functions where the beats are, and this involved a lot of trial and error, using a focused ear to try to discern which track was playing forward or behind, and unlike syncing audio to video, this had to be completely exact, as if it weren’t it would be easy to tell by the cluttered sound you would get after 2 seconds of playback.

I learned a bunch from doing this though, and this mashup was extremely trial and error, and I feel like if I made another sometime, I would have a lot more knowledge of what to do and where to go. But, this took a BUNCH of time, more than I should have left open for this project, and the result was still not perfect by any means. Doing this really gave me a lot more admiration for djs and mashup artists like girl talk. I don’t think you can really comprehend all the work that goes into that until you try actually making a mashup yourself.

On the movie: This involved first taking all the footage… which I would do by spending alternating intervals shooting the concerts with my camcorder and jamming out to the good music. Then I had to get the footage off of my camcorder, by playing it off of the dv tape in realtime over at ITS.
I then moved all of the clips – roughly 55 minutes of footage – to Final Cut Pro, and looked through all of the clips to identify usable footage, and footage that I felt really encapsulated Kohoutek, with some clips that were something interested that happened at the festival, like the crowd taking over the right part of the stage, and police officers kicking them off, and then the band currently playing telling them to get back on, or Matt & Kim starting a dance party after their set. So in some clips I wanted to provide the intimate, more esoteric parts of the festival, that would resonate with the people who actually attended.
I also changed the speeds of a few clips to add effect and save space. After cutting and moving clips that I decided might be good to incorporate in the video, I went through the mashup song, and tried to match artists at moments with the actual footage, or styles with styles. This worked extremely well in some spots, but was not strictly adhered to as I had a different set of artists in the videos as the artists used in the mashup song.

I was very happy with the completed video, and it definitely was a lot easier to make than the mashup, but I think looked more professional in the end.

Enough writing.. let’s just say I have a newfound admiration for girl talk.

we want international students here so that we have many different heritages living together. i don’t think that you should despair if you cannot easily accept pomona college’s norms and social expectations, because your perspective is valuable in that its not the same as ours. culture shock is unpleasant, but remember that we are all learning from what we individually bring to the table. personally, i have never experienced such an open dialogue about sexuality and race either, so you may not be alone.

the thing is, we all come from different places, both at pomona college and in America in general. there is no singular “us” that you can belong to. you can use “us” to refer to middle class white people, or you can be referring to americans born chinese whichever of the numerous groups in the US.

just as the preteen despairs about the rest of his life, i would say that you should give it time. adjusting to culture takes time. this year was overwhelming in multiple ways, and perhaps next year you will emotionally have a little less on your plate. just a thought. anyway, thanks for sharing your feelings.

Also, I think the text in the “Fair Use” block on 13 may not be fully visible — “meant to make copyright less –” ? And some of the quotes on page 15 seem to get cut off, too…