Musicina Blender

Seal vs. Dylan: Beginnings On The Watchtower

Beginnings On The Watchtower (Musicina Blender mashup)

These two songs are not only in the same key, their tempos are only a couple of bpm’s apart. I’ve been wanting to mix “Watchtower” because it is one of the few Dylan tunes that actually has a straight-hard beat through the entire tune.  The Seal tune came to mind recently when my wife and I cut the rug on a Friday night and spent a few hours in our living room dancing to all kinds of stuff.  Man, I remember when that first Seal disc came out. It was one of those discs that everyone seemed to be playing, whether you were at a party, a friends house, a bar, or the radio. You couldn’t escape it. And it was great!

A Marvin Gaye Samba

Marvin Gaye vs. Celso Fonseca - I Heard It Through The Samba (Musicina Blender mix)

I recently saw an amazing YouTube video of Marvin Gaye singing an acapella version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”. I recorded the audio part of the video, and set out to find a way to put a different instrumental spin on the tune.  And like my previous mix of Ryan Adams’s Wonderwall, the answer was found with the sounds of Brazil.  

Celso Fonseca is a guitarist, singer, composer, and record producer, and has played with just about every significant Brazilian artist, from Gilberto Gil to Bebel Gilberto. His voice is quite similar to Caetano Veloso and his guitar playing has the similar style of Baden Powell. His first U.S. release, Natural (2003), features a cool instrumental called Buteco, which is the basic instrumental track under Marvin. In previous versions of this mix, I also included the original keyboard hook from “Grapevine”, but upon further listening, it came across as a bit too obvious, so I took it out. The end result is a totally new musical arrangement.

This tune was mixed on my laptop in a small apartment about 50 yards away from the ocean in the beautiful village of Hana, on the east coast of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. An exquisite place!

A Train Ride Into The Bowels Of Your Imagination

Simon & Garfunkel - A Sound-Poem On the Underground Wall (Musicina Blender Mix)

Here’s a tune that still grabs me after 40 years. (Like most Baby Boomers attending college in the late 60’s, S&G were in high rotation on the dormroom turntable).  The song is a quick sketch, and portrays an introverted, aspiring graffiti artist, trying in the simplest way possible to “make his mark”. The tune ends with the killer line, “To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night.”

For this mix, I used the live 1970 S&G recording of the tune, mixed with a few bars of Pat Metheny’s “Last Train Home”, blended with a hodgepodge of field recordings that I’ve collected through the years.  Trying to provide an ambient context to the lyrical Paul Simon-penned folk tune.

Rehab (Winehouse) vs Sidewinder (Sample)

Rehab (Musicina Blender Sidewinder Mashup)

Elvis the Queen

Elvis Presley / Queen / Louis Jordan - Crazy Little Cruel Thing Called Caldonia

I once won a karaoke contest a few years ago, singing Crazy Little Thing Called Love. I picked the tune because I had just visited Graceland in Memphis and was in a real “Elvis” mood. The tune by Queen always reminded me of something that Elvis would’ve done. And it also seems remarkably similar to Don’t Be Cruel. To really get the boogie woogie feel of it all, I went to the source—the great Louis Jordan recording of Caldonia, from the 1940’s.

Brazilian Wonderwall - Ryan Adams vs. Baden Powell

Canto de Wonderwall (Musicina Blender Mashup)

I discovered the Oasis tune Wonderwall basically by osmosis many years ago, when it used to seep loudly out of my teenager’s closed-door bedroom stereo. A few years back while drifting around online, I heard a terrific acoustic version by Ryan Adams, from a 2003 EP called Love is Hell.

Recently while listening to Adams, the tune weirdly reminded me of a classic 1966 recording from Brazilian guitarist and composer Baden Powell, a tune called Canto de Iemanja, from the album Os Afro Samba. Dont know why—maybe it was the acoustic guitars, or the slow languid romantically melancholic mood. After playing them back to back, I knew this was a mashup that could work. Put two beautifuls together and sometimes it creates a third beautiful. Whataya think?

Craig Armstrong Meets The Stones & Santana

Sympathy For The Devil/Inhaler/Soul Survivor (Musicina Blender Mashup)

I discovered Craig Armstrong a few years ago from his work with Britain’s Massive Attack. This Scotsman is a brilliant composer, producer, and pianist. And he can rock too. Here’s his Wikipedia entry. Here’s his MySpace page.

This is a cool three-way mashup, featuring Armstrong’s tune Inhaler, from his 2002 disc, As If To Nothing. The Mick Jagger vocal, of course, is a classic. And I sprinkled some rhythm from the Soul Survivor track from Santana’s debut disc from 1969.

Michael Hedges (Guitar); Me (Bass); Myself (drums); I (Producer)

Michael Hedges Trio - Aerial Boundaries

As an experiment, I wanted to see if I could create a credible rhythm section (bass and drums) with this tune. (Listen to the original in the post below). My goal was to propel the tune a bit and give it some pop without taking away the essence of the guitar work. All the drums and bass parts were constructed from scratch, from various drum samples and plugins on my main sequencer (Ableton Live).

As a listener, I am very attuned to rhythm sections (having listened to a zillion jazz records for my day-job). I’ve played around with drums too, but am terribly uncoordinated with it. Creating drum tracks digitally is the best I can do. I worked on simply “fiilling the space” as best I could. It was a very tedious project, but I learned a lot about beat making and midi bass playing and feel confident in doing stuff like this in the future.

Enjoy!

Peggy Lee vs. Bob Marley

Reggae Fever

Peggy Lee’s original recording is about as simple and bare as can be—just a single voice, with bass, finger snaps, and minimalist percussion.

I decided to fill the musical space w/cool ambient sounds from Bill Laswell’s dub/remix of Marley, a disc called Dreams Of Freedom. This tune sounds cool on headphones. And the Marley tune, of course, is Exodus.

Remixing and Mashing Up John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”

A Loop Supreme

Actually, this piece is a mashup of Coltrane, Don Braden’s tune “Cousin Esau” (from a 1995 recording called Organic), and percussionist/electronica artist Karsh Kale’s “Break Of Dawn” (from the CD Liberation).

Coltrane’s tune is a true looper’s delight; the four beat bass line is a constant. From the get-go I realized that remixing this tune into some kind of song form seemed a bit trite. The answer was to blend it with something drone-like and Indian in sensibility, which is actually where Coltrane was going in those days. Karsh Kale’s tune fit really well.

Bob Dylan Meets The Beatles

Positively Fifth Beatle

Wouldn’t this be the ultimate bootleg? Legend has it that Dylan turned the Beatles on to weed, but conversely, the Beatles turned Dylan on to the possibilities of rock. Imagine them in the studio together, circa 1964. Could this have been the moment when Dylan truly went electric?

Note that the visual mashup of the album cover syncs perfectly with the audio mashiup. And that Paul McCartney was a killer bass player.