Smashing Mashup

Hello loyal listeners. This is another one pulled from the archives, dusted off, re-jigged and polished for your listening pleasure: Without You (Eminem vs. Yes). But, there is a small tale behind this one.. so humor me a moment. Sherman, set the wayback machine for 2004...

It was around this time that I became aware of the Mashup scene. Party Ben was in full swing on Live 105 in San Francisco and was churning out some great Mashups (if you don't already know Party Ben, go look him up). Having listened to a few tracks, and spent way too many hours making music with Sonic Foundry's Acid (they owned it before Sony bought them up), I thought I would try my hand at a Mashup.

I got a hold of the acapella to Eminem's "Without Me" and just started to goof around with it. As a joke, I looped a section of the 'pella with a section of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, thinking that the two songs were so far a part, how silly it would be to join them.

Well... it worked. It worked really well! In fact, the more of the tracks I laid on top of each other, the more they clicked – they had same basic verse-chorus structure underneath. So after a few hours (or was it days) of work, some sample hunting and splicing, I had a really great Mashup.

Back to 2010.

I keep coming back to this mix and cleaning and polishing it every few years. For the 2010 mix, I've re-sliced some of the guitar loops, added some ADT to the lead vocals, adjusted a few levels and toned down the final master compressor.

To this day, this is still one of my favorite tracks I've done to date.

Enjoy!



Techie Stuff – for those that care.

The drum break and "orchestra hit" that Trevor Horn used on the original Yes track is from the song "Kool is Back" by Funk, Inc. I found a copy of the song and spliced those elements back in to the track along side the originals, but without the odd filtering that Horn did.

Trevor Horn was at one time or another a member of The Buggles, The Art of Noise and Yes. He also has produced just about all of Seal's albums.