Ever wanted to know how to make your own bootleg dance track? Sydney DJ Q45 shows you how.
Bootlegs are a fairly recent phenomenon in dance music, some even say a logical step, considering that the technology that makes them so easy to do has become so affordable (almost free) in the last few years. They are about doing your own remix without the consent of the record companies involved, sticking your finger up at the pop establishment, and are most definitely about creating something that no one else has; a competitive advantage for a DJ or just something to piss off your mate as you massacre his favourite song.
But are they easy to do? Yes!
Basically you get an acapella (a vocal without the music behind it), which you can find everywhere. I’m not gonna suggest where from (‘cause I don’t wanna get sued) but it should be pretty obvious. Then you find an instrumental track that doesn’t have any vocal running right through it. Then the tricky stuff comes in. You have to get the vocal to match the speed (bpm) of the instrumental or vice versa by time stretching one’s speed to match the other. (Time stretching is changing the length of a sound without changing the pitch). This can cause problems, for example, an acapella of the hugely jiggy “Ghetto Superstar” would be around 90 bpm, but to get this to sit in time with say “Plumpy Chunks” by the Plump DJs (around 135bpm) would require a 50% time stretch which usually makes the vocal sound terrible. Sometimes it works, but usually anything time stretched more than 30% will sound pretty bad. Of course, you could always do it in half time, i.e. taking a Hip Hop vocal at 80 bpm and layering it over a Drum & Bass tune at 160 bpm.
The key to getting the time stretching right is to know the correct speeds of both tunes and to use the best possible time stretching program. One of the best at the mo is Prosoniq’s time factory, which I used on my remix of the drum & bass tune Barcelona to slow down MC Stamina’s 173 bpm vocal to 135 bpm. It’s so good you can turn Drum & Bass tunes into half decent breaks tunes. But if the vocal and the beats are pretty close in bpm you can get away with almost any time stretching program.
Also, it’s a good idea to know what key both tunes are in. If they are out of key the bootleg usually sounds a bit wrong. You can change the key using pitch shifting which changes the key without changing the length of a sound
After you have the vocal and beats at the same speed and the same key you can then put them next to each other in your favourite audio sequencer (pro tools, cubase, sonar, logic etc), get the levels right and hey presto! Bootleg superstardom! (And the court case to match!)
In the end, some tunes work together and some don’t. Just try out different combinations until two tunes fit so well that they sound like they were always supposed to be that way. What ever you do, please don’t use an Eminem vocal as it’s been done.
And remember if you’re in Sydney check out Ajax, Kid Kenobi, and myself on Thursday December 11th at the launch of Bootleg at the Globe. We’ll be playing a 3 hour back to back bootleg mash-up set.
