What do you suggest? I've been trying to find an easy and SIMPLE program to mess around and make some mashups with. Garageband would work, but you can't change the tempo of the individual songs like you need - unless I don't know how.
What is a good, inexpensive audio mixer I could mess around with?
thanks.
You 'can' do it in garageband, actually I do a lot of sample based stuff with just garageband.
To get your samples to line up, import your song, cut the begining of it exactly on the first beat you want to use (leave the other end untouched). Then get an idea of what the tempo is, I use an application called metronome sometimes but just think, is it a slow song ? expect the tempo to be in the 80bpm region, normal ? 120 and fast, well it's going to be above that. Then find how long you want your sample to be, simply be counting how many bars there are.
Then press the cycle region button to have garageband play in loop. Under the bar number at the top you should now see another set of coordinants, simply click and drag how many bars you want to loop. Making sure you start on the first bar of your sample. Then play around with the tempo of your project so that when garage band gets to the end of the loop it sound ok when it starts again. You can zoom in to see where that should happen (say for drums you'd probably see the next bass drum kick and want to end right before that). Once it loops properly, cut the sample at the end of the loop.
Now, to be able to change the tempo of the sample, the track must be purple (made native to garageband), by default audio comes in orange. Make sure you don't change the tempo until the end of the instructions as your sample doesn't yet follow the tempo of your project. There's some key command to do it but it usually doesn't work well. So you need to be nifty a little bit to have garageband do a mix down. This has very little to do with beatmatching, it's just that you need garageband to change the format of the content from mp3 or wav to apple lossless so it can than change the tempo of and there are no buttons for that. I do that by cutting my sample in the middle, moving the second half so it ends where the first half starts and join them. You will now have a purple track, but split in half and backwards. So cut it in the middle again do the same thing you just did. Now you have your sample in purple. To be able to change the tempo of your sample, click on the sample then press on the scissors and click on follow pitch and tempo. Et voilà, you can now speed it up by changing the master tempo of your project ! Now cut every sample you want and you're ready for your first mix.
It might sound like a lot of work but actually it makes a lot of sense once you've done it a few times. Or at the very least you will understand what you are doing. So when you grow up to some other program, even if the process is different you'll have a very good idea of what you're doing as you'll have done it in one of the most manual ways. Probably as close as beat matching as possible in the digital world haha. Seriously, do give garageband a shot, I think it's a great learning tool as it's fairly easy to understand and isn't bloated with blinky lights and buttons everywhere, just the important stuff.
Beware of tracks where the tempo is changing (you might not notice it at first). First try it with clean drums, it's much easier to see where the beats are. Try a classic like funky drummer by James Brown, I Got The by Labi Siffre. Or say the intro to In My Place by Coldplay.
Welcome to the world of sampling where your ears somehow listen to just about anything and find beauty in place you never thought possible.
As for other software for mashups, I think Ableton Live is fairly popular dj specific software obviously and maybe Reason are some of the tops. I'm starting to use Logic and I think it does a pretty good job too.
Ugggggh, just noticed I made a super long answer to a two year old thread, I really hope this can help someone anyways...
