yeah, Girl Talk does basically a better edited version of this with rap and pop music

I haven't listened to Girl Talk in a while, but the album I heard, I think Feed The Animals, was pretty spontaneous with a bunch of quick transitions that just blended together into a song. I can't remember which song it was, but I think it was like a Pavement song and a Public Enemy song, which just happened to go together really well. This is more of a treatise on the fact that these six songs (I'm not going to listen to all six) are in the same key and tempo and for the most part their lyrics are about more-or-less the same thing.

I really hate Girl Talk.

I don't really think this is all that similar to Girl Talk. Also, Girl Talk is great for the gym. Perfect for the gym, actually.

Okay guys, take it easy! Popular country music sucks though!

To be fair, the old blues/rock era was noted for how easily everyone ripped everyone else off. The second a baseline or riff (i.e. the old "I woke up this mornin'") proved to be a formula for success, EVERYONE took it and used it shamelessly.

Turning the actual music into a rehashable trope like this makes it even more like a disposable cup than art. It's also pretty bad when the lyrics are so samey. It's basically seeing an entire genre turn into Nickelback.

I respect Girl Talk because I was listening to an interview on NPR and Terry Gross asked him what he was doing before Girl Talk, and he was like a stem cell researcher or something, and this was just sort of a thing on the side. I dunno, that's pretty awesome.

except that this is excruciatingly terrible and blues and early rock are good

crucial difference

fact

The presence of Applejack in your life doesn't mean you have to defend all things remotely related to equines that wear cowboy hats.

You are mistaking me for someone else. I am a Rainbow Dash mark, not an Applejack mark. The only pony with a cowboy hat whom I'm into is Apple FRITTER (totally different!), and Frits only wears cowboy hats on special occasions.

And anyway, that's ad hominem. Autotune *does* undermine the premise of this video, at least as proposed by fluffy, which is that most (all?) country music sounds the same. While I'd be perfectly happy to agree that this is true (see JBF's post above for a succinct explanation as to why), the fact remains that if you've got to autotune the rhythms and the melodies in order to get your song sounding right, then you have not truly demonstrated the principle.

Yeah EH's right. It's definitely autotuned. I didn't listen to all six of them, but the first two are in different keys. Modern Country seems to mostly be about driving your truck out to the creek and skinnydippin' but that's more fun than it is in cold water Oregon, changing into a pair of swim trunks in a stall at the downtown Hilton's bathroom and then getting someone to let us in pretending that you left your keycard in your room. It works every time but it's not really that great of a song, unless you're going for that aesthetic. I can see why southern girls get their panties wet over this kind of shit.

It's not autotuned, it's pitch-shifted. Autotune only works well on individual tracks, not on complete mastered recordings. There is software like Melodyne that allows you to reach in and change the individual notes on mastered recordings but that's not what's being used here.

Pitch shifting happens to sound similar to autotuning because autotuning is just automated pitch shifting.But in this case they're just adjusting the tempo and key so that they're all in the same tempo and key. The melodies still have the same relative pitches as they did before, and that's what's being demonstrated here.

(also it's not my premise, it's the premise of the video)

"The melodies still have the same relative pitches as they did before,"

Do they? I've not heard the original songs, so you could be right about that. However, even something as simple as adjusting tempo would still invalidate the premise (I'm willing to give adjusting keys a pass, assuming you're talking simple transposition). Tempo is an important factor in songwriting, and altering it can have significant effects on the rhythm and emotional feeling of the song. For example, one could Nightcore Liszt's entire catalog in an attempt to "prove" that all of Liszt's compositions were excessively fast and complicated!

Tempo adjustment is a natural requirement when doing pitch adjustment. Also, I don't know how profoundly the tempos were adjusted but it probably wasn't by more than 10% of the originals (before what was needed to cancel out the pitch change).

Also, to me, pitch is WAY more important to a song's timbre than tempo.

*Slight* tempo adjustments are necessary, yes, but as you say yourself , the tempo of each song was most likely adjusted above and beyond the bare minimum necessary for transposing them into a uniform key! Any change in tempo, even a 10% change, is a significant departure from the original song, and enough that we should begin to question the validity of the premise.

Whether pitch is more important than tempo, less important, or equally important, is irrelevant here. Any element of a song which has a noticeable effect on the song's overall sound and feeling needs to be considered, regardless of our subjective opinions about that one element's importance relative to any others.

If I hadn't known this was a mashup, I would have thought it was just one song.

There's multiple things going on and I think I'm causing a bunch of confusion here.

The simplest way to adjust the pitch of a recording is to just speed it up or slow it down. So adjusting pitch will also adjust the tempo as a natural byproduct.

However, modern DAW systems (such as ProTools and Logic) allow you to adjust one without adjusting the other, most simply by slicing up the audio and repeating it to fill in the gaps. This is what causes the artifacts that you and zest accused of being "autotune."

So, yes, these clips did have to be tempo-adjusted somewhat to match, and they had to be pitch-adjusted significantly to match. The pitch adjustment could have been by as much as 6 semitones (half of an octave), and doing it the old-fashioned way would also cause a tempo adjustment by as much as (roughly) 25%, so even if the original tempos were the same, adjusting the pitch without changing the tempo to compensate could have caused around a 25% tempo change (which still isn't really all that significant), which would have had to be undone by the time-slicing/stretching stuff that I briefly described just now.

HOWEVER, if you consider the tempo adjustment and pitch adjustments to be separate things, then I suspect that the actual tempo adjustment would be within 10% or so. It would be easy enough to find the original songs and get their tempos to find out, and I will probably do that later if you really care enough.

Did you get new business cards in? Did they use the don't Cilian Rail?

Stupid iPhone. I meant font.

Heh sorry I get super chatty in the morning. Too much Coffee. And it was Pale Nimbus :)

Certainly not sung by a Scotsman, either.

That's the sad part about this much genre drift.
It's country-pop-rock but the fans call it country, except when they're calling it 'new country' or 'nu country'. Either way, it sucks.

Modern r&b is the same shit- how the hell did they get so far from what makes it great?

Songs about voting Republican for life for theological and race reasons even though you make K a year.