Mashups have lots of potential to go viral because the combine lots of content that people like. Similarly, people like memes. The closest thing I can think of that is a meme-like song mashup is Marble Soda by Shawn Wasabi. However, I'd like to use more ironic pieces, like Slam Jam, Renai Circulation, Kazoo Kid, etc.
Post Completion:
My original intentions were to make a funny mashup of memes. While those can become very popular, I decided against doing so because meme content usually be exclusively interesting to a smaller niche of people than pop music can be, especially the more obscure memes that I would have used. I decided on creating a mix of Childish Gambino songs. Glover's songs are great for mashes because his flow is always clean. I also had vocal and instrumental files of his left over from previous projects.
Good mashups always go viral. From watching the documentary on Girl Talk, it's apparent that people love content that brings together the best parts of other content. With the addition of launchpads and other hardware/software, mashing has become much easy than it used to be. People familiar with creating mixes can easily whip up good content in a matter of hours.
As for the material I used, Childish Gambino was a good base. Normally, general hip-hop is good for use in mashups because the vocals are usually non-restrictive in terms of scales. The instrumentals are often the same way. Hip hop instrumentals are more heavily focused around the drumlines and bass than other popular music, so those instruments can be extracted for non-restrictive instrumental files. Specifically, Childish Gambino music is cleaner than a lot of other hip hop songs so it was a good choice of material. Additionally, content from the same artist tends to follow the same style.
I had a lot of design choices to think about. One thing that was important overall was the decision to keep the mix relatively short, since I had little intention to make (or be able to make) a high-quality full fledged song. The shortness would emphasize the mix's nature as a short clip. Also, virality is normally better for shorter captivating content than longer drawn-out content.
Specifically in the song, I chose to use one main instrumental and put others songs into the main part. I also decided to play around with tuning of a random sound to recreate the instrumental of one of the songs.
The beginning is IV. I removed the onomatopoeia part. I used the sound before "onomatopoeia" to recreate the instrumental for V. From there, I added vocals from Firefly and Bonfire.
I think I created a decent piece of work. I was able to keep the beat adjusted to the vocals, and there is not really any detectable scale dissonance. I think the shortness was also a good choice here. A good quality full song might actually have been better, but I don't think I would've able to produce something that good within this timeframe. My music theory is not the best so it wouldve taken a while.
After going through the process of creating my own mash up and seeing other people's mashups, I realized how much music theory goes into making a good mix. It honestly would be a good idea to take a refresher, especially since I plan on doing something similar for my final project.
IV instrumental and vocals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tqZ3jX9gRQ
V instrumental and vocals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG35R8F2j8k
Firefly vocals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYj9BzjhTC8
Firefly instrumental - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQrmkXdjnXc
Bonfire instrumental - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lJz6Kw2jb4
Bonfire vocals - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBzInZzR1BY
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