8-Bit By A Rabid Squirrel (Part Juan)
The other day, my buddy Patrick FunkEdelic Jennings posted the this on my Facebook page:
Dead Milkmen - STUART by FunkEdeliC KooPA
You might recognize that lovely melody as the Polovtsian Dance Number 2 (huh, huh "Number 2") by Alexander "Mo' bitches" Borodin, but did you know that it originates from a Dead Milkmen song called "Stuart"?
Anywhooo, one of the comments on Fezzzzbook suggested that I add some robotic vocals, which I did, along with some extra percussion. Oh, and I also needed to lengthen FunkEdelic's original version, as it was a verse too short.I decided to see if I could do all of that in under an hour. Here's the end result:
And here's how I did in 59 minutes and 59 seconds:
First I needed to get my hands on FunkEdelic mp3 of the song. The free version of SoundCloud doesn't give you the option to allow downloads (you bastards!), so I used a a program called ARWizard (you can download the demo, which allows you to grab about three minutes worth of sound - which is approx. 9 Ramones songs - for free) to capture the mp3.
ARWizard looks like this, by the way:
And, yes, I could've asked FunkEdelic to send me the mp3, but the clock was ticking.
Now that I had the song, it was time to load it into my DAW of choice (which, for me, happens to be FL Studio) and do some weird crap to it. The first step was to insert an instance of Edison and then load the sample into that for editing.
As I said before, the version that FunkEdelic posted was missing a verse (or maybe our version was a verse too long? Who am I to judge?) I needed to lengthen to the sample. Fortunately, the first verse repeats itself, so I just found the right endpoint, copied what I needed, and appended it to the beginning of the song (if this sounds complicated, trust me; it wasn't. Remember; I'm not Rick Wakeman I play keyboards in the Dead Milkmen).
Now all I needed to do was to trim the section where the two parts met (can you hear the splice on the finished version? Listen to the bit right before "You know that Johnny Wurster kid...") and I had my backing track, which I then exported to the "playlist" (Don't worry; this will all make sense).
Since I can never leave well enough alone, I decided that the track could use some extra percussion, so I opened up Drumaxx, searched around a bit, and was happy to find a kit called "Computer Drums FG". Since I was down to roughly the 30 minute mark at this point, I decided to go with a preset rather than create my own drum part and...
Oh, sweet mutha of crap! I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you how I determined the tempo of FunkEdelic's mp3. I can be such an asshole sometimes. Edison has an auto-detect feature for tempos. Just right-click on the sample rate and it'll appear.
What? You thought I set there with a fuggin' metronome? What is wrong with you people?
Where was I? Oh yeah, after I added the drum parts to the playlist...
