So you wanna be Girl Talk now, huh?
So how does Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) pull off his awesome shows? Well, there’s actually a little bit of tech behind that laptop setup he sports. Here’s how he does it.
1. Purchase CDs
You won’t find Gillis in a rare vinyl shop. All his mash-ups are popular tunes that you can find at your local CD store. If you’re into making high-quality mashes, you’re not going to want to grab a file from Bit-torrent or iTunes. The quality, even on iTunes, is often not at the same level as a CD. To put it in mathematical terms, most CDs are encoded at a cool 320kbps while most iTunes tracks are encoded at a measly 128kbps. While you probably can’t tell the difference in quality when listening to the track over your computer speakers, it could become a problem when you want to burn your high quality mashes to a disk later on. Additionally, a cappella hip-hop and rap albums are pretty easy to come by because DJs use them over other tracks in most night clubs. You can find these in CD stores too.
2. Sample Tracks
After ripping a high quality track from a CD (using a format like .WAV or .FLAC), Gillis uses a program called Adobe Audition (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro) to sample parts of each track. After cutting up the track, he may use this program to play with the sound’s pitch, tempo, or other things. Audition gives him the ability to find, cut, and master his mathematically precise (hey, he is a medical engineer by day) loops and samples before bringing them over to his mix.
3. Mix in real time
When you see Gillis up on stage, he really is putting a track together before your eyes. While his samples are already pre-cut in Audition, he uses a program called AudioMulch to mix them in real time on stage. This allows him to quickly jump from one beat to the next almost seamlessly. From time to time, he has been known to throw down his own beats behind a track, but it’s a rarity. In interviews, he says he tries to stay away from too many effects because his primary goal is to just make music from, well, other people’s music.
So why does Gillis not consider himself a DJ? Instead of simply playing other people’s tracks like any DJ at Rock the Beach would, Gillis tries to make the music his own. “I think a DJ is someone who plays other people’s songs,” says Gillis in an interview to betterPropaganda, “…but I think in the case of me, every single point I’m playing something that’s altered or remixed in someway…the final product is my own creation.”
Here’s to talent and luck! Happy mashing.
Watch Girl Talk create a mash-up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KykbPtRb0K4
At the request of Niteskool’s executive board, parts of this post were removed or changed.
[from betterPropaganda, RemixMag, Open Source Cinema, Flickr]
| Print
But how does he get the different parts of the songs isolated? i.e. just the drums or just the bass or vocal parts.
Kip
November 11, 2008 at 3:21 pm
It says, he uses Audio Audition to break down the track into various samples, eg, melody, bass, vocals, etc
Anon
December 9, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I have adobe Audition but i’m not sure how to seporate out the tracks so clearly.. he definitely has flawless samples.. but how does he extract them???
next greg gillis
February 16, 2009 at 8:27 pm
You can actually buy tracks that are just vocals and just beats and such, these (strangely enough) are most common on single’s albums or on vinyl (especially vinyl).
woop
February 20, 2009 at 2:47 am
same with “next greg gillis”…how do i isolate the specific part of the song in adobe audition…?
running wild
August 24, 2009 at 12:59 am
You can’t isolate specific parts of a song with a program like adobe audition, or with anything else on the mass market so far. The problem is in the frequency spectrum: that a high hat will have some of the same frequencies as the lead vocal, for example. Girl Talk will be buying a cappella (just the vocals) versions or just the beats from songs on their own, from CD/vinyl shops (like it says in the article). He just uses audition, meticulously, and very well, to piece together different samples taken from these CDs/vinyls. For now, that’s all we can do.
Jdfb
October 7, 2009 at 10:10 am