I hadn't heard the New York demo until it was posted up on Get Your Bootleg On - having been put straight several times now *ahem* I now know it's a Freddie Mercury demo from 1984. The original demo consists of vocal and piano (which sounds kinda like a Broadway show rehearsal!) only - that's it - one verse, one chorus, and three chords.....hmmm...not a lot really!

OK, firstly lets get rid of the piano! Well I tried to anyway - it does poke it's head out every now and then. This was done using Soundforge noise reduction. The sequenced synth bass is derived from Radio Ga-Ga, done primarily to give some Queen 'familiarity' - there is a typical club off-beat bass on top to reinforce the bottom end. Kick drum is courtesy of Darude (cheers!) - stick a loop over the top and  some 909 hatz and we're off. The opening chords are made up of three separate pads overaid to try and get as 'lush' as possible. We need more 'Queenness' now - Brian May wasn't available but luckily he's left a fair few riffs about the place! Most of the guitars were taken from Spread Your Wings (what an absolutely blinding track!). The feedback  that introduces the guitar part in the chorus is taken from around 3'26", the first power chord is from Save Me - it had a really nice attack cos it was out on it's own. The riff that appears in the last chord of the chorus is from around 2'33". The echoey turnaround riff at the end of the chorus is taken from around 3'17". All these samples were taken from vinyl and not CD by the way. Phase inversion was used to remove most of the vocals, although you can still hear a ghostly echo of freddie voice singing the word 'maa-a-aan' (from 'just because you're a free man'). To get all the guitars to sound 'consistent' I put them back through a warm overdrive and to get a stereo spread back (the phase inversion left them mono) I put it through a multi chorus to give that 70's red special  phasing / flanging effect. The mix was automated in Cubase for filtered vox in the drop down with a slap back delay and panned multi-tap. Light limiting via Waves Ultramaximiser then mastered in T Racks. So.......there you have it.

Don Estelle was short and quiet, Windsor Davies tall and bawdry - a classic comedy partnership then! 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' hails from a forgotten golden age of comedy when things weren't quite so PC - I loved it!! The version of Whispering Grass used here performed before a live audience is from a stolen BBC real media file. It's been pitched down a bit hence the Sargt Major sounding even deeper than usual. He did have quite a voice our Lofty, didn't he?

Pretty straightforward build this - the pella runs around 99bpm (well, the version I've got does anyway) - so I time stretched Saliva and Groove Armada to match. Minor tuning correction needed to Saliva, just brought it up a tad to match Groove Armada.
Main pella dropped a semi tone.Like all my builds, this was constructed in Cubase VST. Just for shits and giggles I decided to mimic the "I see you baby"  vocal sample, but using Jay Z's intro at the start of the track. The Saliva track was causing problems in so much that it was running away with the track meaning the transition from the Groove Armada verse to saliva chorus and back again wasn't working. The fix was to have breakdowns before and after the chorus with introductory "here comes the chorus" drum fills and judicious use of GA's filtered synth hook to get us back into the verse - whichsorted it all out. Also I underlayed the chorus with the Groove Armada drum loop to keep the shuffled feel going and get a bit of coherence. The pella was heavily compressed using WAVES C1 DX plug in as it sounded a bit twee and was getting lost. I chopped the rap around so it actually sounds in time (for once! - it's that bollox about "My texture is the best fur chinchilla" that's really all over the place) and the whole mix was put through WAVES Ultramaximiser to hammer out the kinks and make it sound even louder maaaaaaaan!!!  Minimal FX usage - just a delay to hold the vox over into the 2nd "Yes, so crazy" rap breakdown and Multi Tap Waves delay for the ending. There was a fair bit of automation in the mix - this was needed because the Ultramaximiser was hiding some elements - I had to ride the crash and Saliva drum loop (which was was put under the GA verse for coherence). Also the bit rate filter at the front and delay mixes were auto'd.

The hard work was done with this one - seeing as Braces Tower had already come up with the initial bootleg. I just wanted something quick to play around with - so remixing this excellent boot seemed like a cool idea. A bootleg of a bootleg - not a remix more of a reboot! The FBS track didn't like being pitched down to meet the vocals so I ended up taking just drum breaks and the intro SFX from it, then rebuilt the sub bass and layered The Who original guitar over the top. The guitar was sounding a bit twee so I stuck it through some overdrive and very mild chorusing to give some girth(!) It was obviousl from the start that the track would have to just build and build - I threw in some FX samples and a conga loop. I was determined to use the Elton John Pinball Wizard track partly because it's a Who track anyway and partly cos it's pretty much the same riff on the outro. Unfortunately it had to be shifted up two whole tones (shudder) but I somehow got away with it. The timing of the EJ track was all ove the shop so I cut each bar up into four and hand placed each one beat chunk to line up perfectly. The intro and outro dialogue was taken from the Who BBC sessions CD. Incidentally Pete was actually talking about "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" and NOT "Can't Explain" at the start - funny how these things get twisted, eh?

Superstition varies anywhere between 99 to 104 bpm in parts – aaaaah, the joys of a live band – anyway I made two time stretched versions of the track; one stretched from 99 to 100bpm and one down from 104 to 100bpm. I figure I’ll have enough material here to piece together a backing that’ll run at a solid 100bpm. There is a fair bit of instrumental stuff to pilfer at the end of the track but unfortunately, all the two bar loops without vox have a crash at the front which would become very obvious (and irritating) when put back to back as loops. The answer was to use the front end of the loop where the first vox come in, which is relatively crash free and bolt it on. The backing track was chopped around in cubase to get it running in time which meant edits pretty much every beat of the bar. There’s only one bridge without vox and it’s a bit light in the drums department, so I ran part of the drum loop that’s out on it’s own from the front of the track underneath. Now it’s in time we build a mimic layout of the original stevie track. Sounding good. What about the vocals – well the unusual placement of the verse vox in the Destiny’s track was never gonna work here, so I had to shift them to a more conventional ‘on the beat’ location – the backing bridge sit’s nicely with the intro to the chorus vox, which is a welcome turn of fate! Listening to Superstition over and over again reminded me of Play that Funky Music by Wild Cherry – so I thought it would be cool to see how much of that I could get in. Not much as it turned out – the distinctive guitar riff was clashing nicely with the equally distinctive clav riff – oh well, let’s just nick the guitar solo then.……..Further messing with the structure – a cheeky nod to Wild Cherry intro and one final point of the finger at plagiaristic Peter Gabriel and there you have it – “very booty-stitious”.

Not telling this time!! (: P) Only really interesting thing about this boot was pitching the pella down a tone (using Melodyne) but I didn't time stretch it. It did need to go from 130bpm to 150bpm but it was just sounding very Larry the Lamb vibrato, so I opted to chop up the pella in it's original tempo, kinda like a manual version of Recycle! That was fun.........!!

"Rudolph loves to boogie"

->>8       MERRY CHRISTMAS!      8<<-

This one's a true Christmas Crapper - a real Yule Log!! An easy A+B created for the Get Your Bootleg On Christmas Challenge. Stupid and makes me laugh. Winner.

Well I'll be honest - I've had this kicking round for some time now (Er 4 years to be precise!!) so I thought it I might as well dig out the old boy and dust him down. Bit of a cop out really as there's no genre mixing so it was a pretty easy construction - actually that's not really true.....Although Rockers Revenge were very helpful cos they put the full blown acappella on the back of the 12 inch version of the track, unfortunately, the Stardust backing really DID NOT like being retuned to meet the vocal and was in fact unworkable. Confession time: that means we had to recreate the sample - pain in the arse!!! This was done....wait for it..........on a Roland sound canvas with plenty of aftermarket grunging & EQing. The git sample was stuck on separately to keep more control and stop thing sounding messy in places where there was just too much going on. The whole acappella was chopped up through Recycle and the track was built up on a MAC G4 Cubase system. The original version was white labelled and was a heavyweight 6 and a half minutes following standard dance construction methods of something changing every 4 bars building up to chorus, then a drop then Kitchen sink it and strip back every 4 bars to DJ mix out point - very formulaic. This version has been cut back to 4 and a half minutes

Two album tracks meant there was a fair bit of "reverse engineering" to do here, stripping the vox out of "Suicide" and stripping the Rhodes out of "Woodstock". Just to add to the fun, there is a goodly amount of "feel" involved in both performances - in other words, the timing was all over the fecking shop!! Suicide first then - there was not enough track on it's own to contemplate building a whole song, this meant the vocals had to be removed. I used the old phase vocal cut trick in soundforge which worked a treat but left no bass, erm, no real drums - in fact all it actually left me was the guitar - we'll keep this to one side then for the moment. Using Mrs Mash's karaoke feature of her tiddly hi-fi gave me a mono version with no vox, drums still very much diminished BUT a solid bass line - this is good!! Going back to the phase vocal cut version - I mixed down to mono due to the uncomfortable stereo "pressure" it had. I've now got separate mono guitar and bass tracks. Taking these into Cubase - I treated the guitar track with a stereo ADT  to attempt to match the stereo width of the guitar on the original mix. This immediately gave a nice stereo spread against the centre bass line and wouldn't hog the sonic space where the vox were going to sit. The backing is sounding good - apart from the small problem there's no drums!! There is a god however (no, not Churchill), and luckily for me, he left his presence at the beginning of the track in the form of a drum loop out on it's own - so I just nicked that and edited it to mimic fills as required to match the original track, also adding crash and ride samples for good measure (with WAVEs plug in reverb and Delay). I went for an educated guess tempo of 96.5bpm and built looping sections of intro, chorus, verse 1 and verse 2. I kept some of the original track for where it all kicks up with the power snare and gets nasty - so you can see how well or not my recreated backing matches the original as it mixes in. On to "Woodstock" - captured into Pro Tools - the track consists of vocal and Rhodes which are 50% opposite panned - Ditch the left track cos that's predominantly Rhodes. Then, to get rid of the Rhodes on what's left, I used Soundforge DX Noise Reduction plug in, taking the 40 seconds Rhodes intro as a noiseprint then knocking it back -60db throughout the whole track. Sometimes this produces heavy artefacts on what's left - strange flanging etc. but the vocal came out relatively unscathed. Finally bring in the daddy of pitch shifting and time stretching, the SUPERB Pitch n Time plug in in Pro Tools, for minor pitching and time stretching - if you can get hold of this plug in it's a MUST HAVE!!! Pull the vocal into Cubase add some swirly delay (again WAVEs plug ins are excellent if a little power hungry for lower spec machines) - then peppered liberally with sound bites from the Woodstock movie for that genuine summer of love vibe.

I really wanted to use acid pro (the Kenwood Chef of mash-makers) but couldn't get on with it (need to take time out with it) so ultimately I only used it for beat mapping the vox and main track (both as a whole). The vox came out around 100bpm and the backing at 86.935(!) - although the backing is essentially a live band they obviously worked to a click cos it's pretty bang on all the way through. After messing around with stretching it was obvious the backing just didn't work at higher bpm's so I dropped the vox back to match with Soundforge, and pitched the backing down to meet the vox (around a tone). Result? 2 basic elements that will run up against each other in tune, in time - over to cubase. Salvaged all usable loops from the backing. The intro chorus and riff were all out on their own, but the verse required building using bit's that were free of vocals and glued together (some of these parts were smaller than a sixteenth note). Try as I might I couldn't get a clean last 32nd of the verse loop = drastic action required. Exported the glued loop as a complete .wav and time stretched the very last section to cover the gap then brought it back in, and amazingly it worked. Now it's down to structuring, it was obvious that as the vox was now running considerably slower I'd have to loose some or end up with a bloody long mix. All but 4 bars of the intro stuff was dropped and I ended up cutting out a complete chorus from the end section, other than that it's relatively unscathed. The backing structure mimics it's original structure before losing the vox - including the solo (had to keep that!). The vox needed some dynamic control, as they were a bit 'lively', especially against a 0db flat lining rock track - insert cubase dynamics. To get the mix 'together', it was mastered through a Waves Ultramaximiser to kill off any rogue peaks. MP3 conversion courtesy soundforge.