Two of my favourite songs are Judie Tzuke’s beautiful “Stay With Me Till Dawn” and Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” from Dark Side of the Moon.
So it was with great interest I discovered a mashup of the two. Mashups are not remixes per se, but are usually two or more songs intertwined. In this case it’s Floyd’s (original) music playing whilst Tzuke sings her (original) lyrics at the same time.
This means taking the original 1970s recordings and using a digital audio program like ACID or Garage Band to adjust them – or selected parts of them – to match up. This software can (time) stretch one without changing the pitch (key). Or adjust the pitch without the time. Or even beat-match; adjust the tempo of one song to match the other.
I’m sure this has serious concerns from a legal sense, but I’m looking at it from a musical and technology view.
As I said, this mashup is the musical intro from “Breathe” intertwined with (some) of the vocals and music from “Stay”. It sounds like she is singing her lyrics to the backing of the Floyd song. Very clever.
Now, “Stay” is built around a two-chord line; Bb then up a tone to C, Bb then C.
“Breathe” too is structured around two chords, but a minor chord Em, A, Em, A…
So if directly mashed together it would sound…not good at all. Bb(with Em), C(A)
But if we drop “Stay” by a semi-tone it becomes A, B
And up “Breathe” by a tone to F#m, B …
The mash becomes A (F#m), B(B)
Interesting. The chords of A and F#m have 2 notes in common A and C#. I believe these two chords are actually ‘cousins’ – in music terms: “relative minors”. In fact a variation of A – called A6 – sounds very much like F#m.
So, musically, A and F#m are pretty much the same thing. If you play an A chord whilst I play an F#m it doesn’t sound that bad. So, we’ve got the essence of our mashup.
I think the creator of the mashup used their software to adjust the pitch of the two songs by the amounts above. They may have needed to adjust the tempo, via beat matching.
Listening carefully it seems they actually made a micro adjustment of the pitch as the chords are just a bit below A and B. This may be because the original songs were not quite in concert pitch; i.e. the instruments on the recordings were all tuned to each other but not ‘absolutely’ tuned. Or the recording tape etc may have run a tiny bit slow.
The result works very well. A nice mix of musical and technology smarts.
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