Chuck D and Hank Shocklee Interview

How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop is a real interesting interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on sampling and copyright and remixing.

Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There's one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your "By the Time I Get to Arizona." It sounds like you're rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?

Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it's great.

Chuck D is pretty cool.

BradlinkComment
Making Me Nervous MatterOverMind Mix

Making Me Nervous (MindOverMatter Mix). Barry from wrote about his process on his blog:

I really liked the song already, and I'd been looking for an excuse to sit down and actually learn how to use GarageBand. I decided to see what I could do using only Brad's source tracks and the loops included with GarageBand. (I'd like to say I wanted to do this for the added challenge but it was really because I was too damn lazy to play in any new parts myself.) BTW, I found that it required approximately zero brain cycles to convert Brad's tracks to the GarageBand format using the AppleLoops SDK.

I've heard a lot about GarageBand but don't have a Mac so I've never gotten a chance to try it. I've linked this in the forums for discussion. Thanks Barry!

Making Me Nervous Mandola Mix

Making Me Nervous (Mandola Mix). Adam Sampson writes:

I thought it'd be fun to do an acoustic mix of Making Me Nervous, so here's one. The only instrument's my no-brand cheap mandola, with the "pickup" (an old tieclip mic and some Blu-Tak) attached to different sides for the two parts. I was originally hoping to do this in one take per part but failed miserably; it actually took a couple of takes and some editing, about three hours in total. Multitracked, edited and mixed down using Audacity on Linux.

This open source music thing is cool. :)

Thanks Adam!

I'm starting to post all these remixes to the forums if people want to discuss them.

BradextrasComment
Making Me Nervous Accidental Mix

c. layne sent in this cool Making Me Nervous (accidental mix) and said this about it:

this remix happened completely by accident. this was a song i was working on for the 'pass/fail' songfight! a few weeks back, but i never got the motivation to finish it. i stumbled back on it today, and thought to myself, as i do on occasion, "wow, this is sickeningly similar to 'making me nervous,' except about 5bpm faster." so i slowed it down accordingly, and threw the vocals in, and who would've guessed? it fit right in.

Very neat, it's like an original mash-up. Thanks c!

SmartMusicKIOSK

I like the write-up for this SmartMusicKIOSK thing:

SmartMusicKIOSK is a new music-playback interface for trial listening. Traditionally in music stores, customers often search out the chorus or ``hook'' of a song by repeatedly pressing the fast-forward button, rather than passively listening to the music. This activity is not well-supported by current technology. This research achieves a function for jumping to the chorus section and other key parts of a song, plus a function for visualizing song structure.

and:

While entire songs of no interest to the listener can be skipped on conventional music-playback interfaces, SmartMusicKIOSK is the first interface that allows the user to easily skip sections of no interest even within a song.

I hope it also dispatches robots to kick the songwriter in the nuts too, that'd be swell.

Bradlink Comments
Remixing and Forums

Releasing the source for Making Me Nervous (still available here) has gone way, way better than I expected it to and I'm real happy about it all. I was feeling a bit blocked and down and it's been a lot of fun seeing people experiment with my song and also getting a chance to do a bunch of it myself. I'll be putting the next song source online sometime this week (not sure which one yet, feel free to cast your vote). I've put up some discussion forums here if anyone wants to use them to yak about remix stuff.

To kick things off I've posted an unfinished remix of Making Me Nervous in there that I'm not sure I have time to finish. Feel free to give input, ideas, pick it up and do whatever with it. Or if you're like a lot of people who have their own half-done remixes, feel free to post those.

Bradlink Comments
Making Me Nervous Sunken City Mix

Scott Andrew sent in this Making Me Nervous (Sunken City Mix) which is quite cool. He says on his weblog:

I wanted to do something reminiscent of early 90's industrial rock, a la Filter/Stabbing Westward/Gravity Kills. Most of the beats and sounds are stock samples that came with FruityLoops Studio, stretched and beatsliced beyond recognition (I'm too lazy (and inexperienced) to create my own loops). Except for the guitar; that was my Telecaster through a Fender Cyber-Twin (great studio amp, stupid name), sampled and converted to groove clips in Sonar.

Kick ass.

Your Face In A Making Me Nervous Video

Allen Henderson of Maedes Production is working on a video for my song Making Me Nervous and wants your face for it:

Some "Doom"-spoofed video segments will include virtual extras in the style of 3-D sprite animation. And they need faces! Get converted to pixels and then shot with a gun without having to put down your sandwich. Who could ask for more?

Send 2 digital portrait shots of your face, head-on and in profile, to production@maedes.com subject line: Making me Nervous Extras.

More details here.

Bradlink Comments