The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Not sure if that is a good title, but I just had a good idea for some side fight funisms. We have a ton of great guy/girl and guitar music here. I often listen to the songs and think of how I could rock the heck out of it.

The way it works:
1. The original artist has to OK their song that will be getting the producer treatment. The original artist can not rework one of his/her own songs.

2. The song has to be built from the originally submitted version. It is ok to ask the original artist things like, chords, lyrics if not posted, BPM, etc, but no asking to re-do anything for you. The song has to be chopped up from the original form.

3. The producer can do all of the layers him/herself, or solicit others to do certain parts. But the producer has to chop and arrange the new version him/herself before sending out to the collaborators.

The final goal is to take a beautiful G&G song and make it a rockin' hit!

It would probably have a start and due date after GOM.

Any thought on the details, problems or added ideas for this project?

*sees thread regarding g&g. runs over like it's the batsignal*

G&G...........................................................

edit: looks like a pretty strong head wind.

so basically, you just want to cover a song in your style? "the idiot kings" did this last year. he picked me and reist and king arthur (i think) and rocked the darn heck out of my number.

why don't you put up a list of songs that meet your criteria for needing a rock-enema?

edit: what is GOM?

The Weakest Suit wrote: edit: what is GOM?

Gay Old Man.

Apparently BLT wants to do that first.

Not a cover. We have to actually keep the original G&G song singer as the lead vocals and the guitar as the rhythm guitar. Then take it from there and turn it into a whole new jam with our own backup vocals, instruments, arrangement, sound FX, etc etc.

Well, this is the think tank. I was much more enthusiastic after drinking coffee this morning, but not much enthusiasm right now.

So basically people post their G&G songs that they did here at SF and people take them. I guess it would be fine for more than one person to do the same song.

Another idea:
People post NEW G&G songs here, then others call them. Kind of like a collab based off your G&G song.

Caravan Ray wrote:

The Weakest Suit wrote: edit: what is GOM?

Gay Old Man.

Apparently BLT wants to do that first.

Oh good, you got my email.
so?........

HOW ABOUT like at remixfight, where they take let everybody make their own remixes out of the same source material. Somebody's song is uploaded, then all the new spicy arrangements battle it out.

Caravan Ray wrote:Gay Old Man.

Hey, I'm all for doing whatever it takes to bring Morrissey to the site.

Lord of Oats wrote:HOW ABOUT like at remixfight, where they take let everybody make their own remixes out of the same source material. Somebody's song is uploaded, then all the new spicy arrangements battle it out.

That's not a bad idea. It would make things work a lot easier.

I had asked Bjam if I could do this with one of her songs, although I wanted to make it a Delerium-esque dreamy synthy electronica song instead... but I had trouble because the tempo was not rock solid. So I shelved it for the time being, but I'd love to go back to it sometime if I could figure out how to sync it.
-bill

That is the challenge, Bill. It would be great if the G&G songs were played to a click track, because many here depend on that. Although I play everything in real time, my drum programing is hard to do. But I had a little test run with it and it can be done, or at least with Cubase, not sure about the other programs.

There may be an easier way, but what I did is this:
1. Lay the G&G track on track 1
2. Use a beat calculator and identify the BPM as close as possible.
3. Identify the intro, verses, choruses, bridge, outro.
4. Expand the track to use the peak and valley meter (drawing a blank on the name at this moment, lol) and split the track on the down stroke peak between the parts
5. At this point you need to decide if you want to make each looped part the same size using a time stretch/warp (one that doesn't change the pitch) to make each loop identical in size, which is the easiest way. Or stretch/warp your drums to fit the loops. The later keeps it more real, assuming the timing isn't too far off. If a loop, such as a verse loop, has too much variation in bpm, you can even break that loop into 4 individual loops to stretch/warp each little piece, and so on.
6. Now with each part in a loop, you can treat each loop independently to add drums and percussion instruments.
7. If you make it this far before giving up, you're on easy street. You now have everything set in loops with a bpm that you can play to, whether it be real time, sound loops or sequencing, etc.

Did I forget anything?

I don't see how this solves wandering tempo.

Starfinger had told me that I could do a similar variable stretching thing in Live but I didn't figure it out at the time. Also, it's a lot of detail work and I didn't have enough patience for it.
-bill

it's quite easy to do in Live

What's Live?
I just break a loop into as many pieces as need be to get it stretched/shrunk until it sounds natural.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:What's Live?

http://www.ableton.com/live
Basically a somewhat different DAW that, according to reviews I've read, is particularly great to use in live situations (duh?). I can't say I got into it much when I tried it.

Ok, I'm downloading the trial version. I like to try new things to get a better understanding. It has a feature called "elastic audio" as well as a couple other features to correct time. Sounds cool.

everything i've done for songfight has been done in Live, fwiw

over the years it has adopted more and more "standard" DAW functionality, but it's still focused on doing things in a very non-linear way

-craig

Bump. The original G&G would probably need to be recorded to a click in the first place.

It sure would help if it was recorded to a click. But I must say, it's a fun challenge to try matching programmed drums to a fluctuating speed, lol. Very time consuming if you want to flawless.
By the way Henry, one of your G&G songs is one of my test songs. You either have impeccable timing or you play to a click.

I may jump on this if the kinks get ironed out and some rules laid down. Gotta have a click for me to try and play my clunky drum stylings to, or go beatless. Nothing wrong with going beatless, of course.