Remixing and Pandora

Recently, I have taken up a new hobby: Remixing.

It started with a trip to the gym and a desire to create a political parody. A few months ago, I heard a song called Making Me Nervous, by Brad Sucks, while listening to one of my Pandora stations on the treadmill. That song is very catchy. It instantly sunk its teeth into my head and would not let go. I later googled the song, downloaded it, playlisted it, and listened to it over and over again for a few days straight. Like I said, it's catchy! Anyway, it wasn't long before I started coming up with my own lyrics for it and thought how great it would be if I could actually record it.

I was on a mission. First, I would need some instrumentals to sing to. How could I duplicate the instrumentation on Making Me Nervous? Well, I got to researching and discovered that Brad Sucks provides the source files for all of his songs for free on his website. He even encourages people to create remixes with them and then post them on ccmixter.org! How cool is that? I would be able to make my parody without having to pirate any music! I felt a surge of validation that this was meant to happen. If only I had a microphone and some recording software...

After some googling, I found some software by NCH, called MixPad, free for 30 days. Then I found an old USB headset that I had lying around to record my vocals. It was coming together.

I started recording, but the audio quality from the old headset was not that great. It sounded like I was singing into a telephone. I needed to get my hands on a better microphone, but without shelling out a lot of money. After some more googling, I discovered the perfect microphone for my purposes, available at Best Buy. It even comes with some semi-professional recording software. Sweet! The only problem was the $100 price tag. There was no way my wife would consider a microphone to feed my obsession to be a justifiable expense....

Lucky for me, my birthday was right around the corner. And as luck would have it, a certain generous family member (not my wife) found it in their heart to give me Best Buy gift card. I felt another jolt of validation. Recording sessions, here we come! If only I could find some free time without the the wife and kids around to finally lay down some tracks...

Well, it just so happened my wife had planned a trip to visit her sister in Texas for a week, and while she was gone, my mother was good enough to keep the kids at her house. Ah, serendipity! I took full advantage of the opportunity and recorded my Making Me Nervous parody, but didn't stop there. I also recorded a little birthday ditty for my parents, called You Are 57, and shot a video for that to boot (see previous post).

More and more music-making ideas have been flooding my brain every day. Since I started playing around with this stuff three weeks ago, I have created a total of four mixes, all available here: http://ccmixter.org/people/cuajitoben. Pending available free time, there will be more still to come.

And to think this all started from listening to Pandora at the gym. I would never have predicted that internet radio could impact my life so dramatically...