Podcasting Hacks

Make a Mash-Up

Mash-ups of music and voice are an exciting way to liven up your podcast.

Mash-ups or bootlegs are two or more tracks that you combine to create a third different track. They started as a genre with hip-hop DJs doing mixes for radio and live performances in the late 1970s and early 80s, but the revival started in 2001 with “Stroke of Genius” by Freelance Hellraiser and Girls on Top (a.k.a. Richard X).

Anyone with access to a home computer can make mash-ups, which is one of the reasons they have become so popular over the last four years. Mash-ups come in several types, but the one most people have heard is the A versus B type, in which you combine two tracks—say, a track from Christina Aguilera and one from the The Strokes. Another type of mash-up is a glitch, in which you cut tracks into small pieces, and distort and warp them.

Mash-ups can comprise more than two tracks: mash-up artists such as DJ Earworm and Loo & Placido combine up to 10 tracks into 1 in their crazy mash-up juggling acts. I’ll be focusing on just two tracks in this hack.

Good Mash-Ups

Creating mash-ups, like all audio cut-up and musical culture, is an art; as such, deciding what is good or bad is subjective. Certainly, some mashes and bootlegs don’t work on a technical or musical level, but something to regard is what type of audience your mash is for. Are you creating it purely to listen to, as comedy, or to prove a musical point (e.g., these tracks are the same!), or for the dance floor? Many ...