So, Tropers can do music too, right?

Witches of the 70s - Give Up The Guns. I'm proud of this one - one of the closest things we have to a "pop song" in terms of structure, while still being pretty weird and pretty "us". I mainly contributed the music for the verses, plus a little backing vocal bit in the hook. More stuff is kinda in progress BTW- last time I just waited until we had 10 finished tracks and tried to get a decently flowing track order for a "mini album" out of that, and that might just be what we do again

Edited by MikeK on Sep 24th 2022 at 10:40:16 AM

Do mashups count here? I made a video for my first real mashup in years: Wu-Tang Clan x Donkey Kong Country 2. I replayed the majority of DKC 2's "Hot-Head Bop" with Plogue's Chipsynth SFC plugin, and used AI separation for the Wu-Tang's vocals and drums from "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'".

Edited by AfroThunder on Sep 30th 2022 at 3:04:04 PM

I'm more familiar with the Wu Tang part of the equation, but sounds cool.

Two more recent Witches of the 70s tracks:

Sleepy Gorilla. The title is kind of a Permanent Placeholder thing I initially called the unfinished instrumental bit "Sleepy Gorilla" because I was trying to emulate a cheesy synthpop song on the soundtrack to Sleepaway Camp but ended up with something I also kinda thought was like Gorillaz (I may have also been subliminally influenced by a poster in my room of the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). Anyway, my collaborator actually added samples of actual gorillas to it, and then the lyrics ended up kind of fitting in an odd way.

Dance Machine / Mood Swing Set. Includes samples of a swing set and a cheesy 70s commercial. I wrote and rapped verses 1 and 2, my collaborator did verse 3 and 4 - I feel like there's a lyrical tone shift between our two parts, but it kinda works and I guess that's part of the weirdness of how we work together. Also I feel like everyone should be permitted to rhyme "chance", "dance" and "pants" in the same verse exactly once, so I just used my pass on this song.

Edited by MikeK on Oct 10th 2022 at 4:19:45 AM

I covered Taylor Swift, kinda - I have a long tradition of what I've heard called "shitpost covers", but I prefer my self-coined term "experimental nonsense versions"; usually this involves not even trying to actually learn how to play what I'm supposedly covering. Partway through I realized what I was making sounded more like "Pensacola" by Soul Coughing than it did "Anti Hero", so I threw in a little reference near the end.

Edited by MikeK on Dec 22nd 2022 at 7:46:52 AM

The Taylor cover has spun off into a whole Cover Album where I just do songs written by / made famous by performers of the opposite gender. Berlin's "Take My Breath Away". The album as a whole is kind of a goof so far, and this take on the song is... not Stylistic Suck exactly, but I did purposely pick strange-sounding midi presets and sing in Perishing Alt-Rock Voice.

Edited by MikeK on Jan 9th 2023 at 10:16:43 AM

i released my second album christmas eve, under the very wieldy title of deepform and the terrible horrible no-good very bad day. i've been getting into post-punk, no wave, berlin school, and the like lately and decided to make a little sendup of it.

this also leads me onto announce i'm starting another musical project, man ray, as an antithesis to the denser, more complex soundscapes i've been working on lately - no releases out yet but i'm devising it as this super-stripped back thing a la suicide or young marble giants, and i'm aiming to have an EP or two out sometime in the coming month.

RYFS3: a tribute to the superior gender. I had fun with this weird project and might have a sequel one day, though it kinda is a sequel to 2 other weird/silly cover albums (ryfs3 = "ruins your favorite songs volume 3"). Other than the "all songs written/ made famous by women thing" I mainly tried to pick songs that 1) I actually like and 2) I haven't personally heard sung by males before. Leader of the Pack is "featuring" Witches of the 70s because it was Curty's idea and he did more of the work. Uh Oh predates everything else by a couple years and I actually retroactively plunked it off another cover album and onto this one pretty much because I could.

Edited by MikeK on Jan 16th 2023 at 9:17:15 AM

Made a sort of mashup of songs like how people mix songs live. The songs used in order are:

Musique by Daft Punk,
Obsession (vocals only) by Ok Go (- 0.5s pitch),
Branchless by YOYLECAKE Michael (+ 1.5s pitch),
and Revolution 909 by Daft Punk (- 0.5s pitch).
Honestly really proud of how it turned out, basically exactly how I envisioned it in my head .

Another live-style mashup, this time of some Ed Banger Records classics.

Uses elements of and Samples:
Waters of Nazareth - Justice,
Dog - SebastiAn,
and Signatune (Thomas Bangalter Edit) - DJ Mehdi.\\

My cover of "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand" originally by Primitive Radio Gods. I feel like this is back to the spirit of how I used to do "covers" - try to learn a song, fail in a way that's sort of interesting, try to sing the lyrics over the results anyway. This might be for another cover album with a loose movie theme (it was on The Cable Guy soundtrack)

Edited by MikeK on May 29th 2023 at 11:23:13 AM

Witches of the 70s - Abacedarius (I've been going back and forth on giving it a subtitle, like "Abacedarius - The Grasshopper Song"). Musically this was supposed to be Primus-like, with maybe a little bit of Soul Coughing in the outro. Lyrically it's kind of two things mashed together - I stumbled on a Shaker poem meant to teach the alphabet through listing animals and decided it would be fun to set to music, then I decided to combine it with a set of original lyrics when I realized they also had an animal theme. Then I also added a Beastmaster sample just because.

Edited by MikeK on May 29th 2023 at 11:17:16 AM

Que Sera, Sera, another silly cover that might go on the movie covers album I might finish (the original, by Doris Day, was in The Man Who Knew Too Much). My initial goal was "what if Tom Waits sang this?", but I decided my attempt at a Tom impression sounded too much like The Singing Resident, so I ran with that vibe instead.

Edited by MikeK on May 30th 2023 at 7:05:22 AM

Somehow a facebook thread about junk drawers and a persistent earworm led me to write a parody of "Pepper" by Butthole Surfers about the subject.

Edited by MikeK on Jun 26th 2023 at 11:20:25 AM

My K-Pop stan of a friend begged me not to release this NewJeans remix, because he thought the stans would come after me and dox me for "ruining" the song.

Of course, I'm not a very good listener. I turned it from a 2-Step track into a Timbaland-styled R&B slow jam.

Is the bass synth sampled directly from "Pony" or did you somehow find the same synth patch?

It's a one-shot I got from a sample pack, but it's taken straight from the EMU Morpheus synth, which is what Timbaland used for the bassline on Ginuwine's "Pony".

Apologies for the double post, but I also released the instrumental to that NewJeans remix as well.

here’s a weird bassline thing i came up with last night

Edited by c1beat7per9minute on Jul 15th 2023 at 8:33:26 AM

I made a freestyled experimental comedy rap album

Reviews are very welcome, encouraged, in fact!

This Album’s AOTY page

Edited by TheRealBerdly on Jul 25th 2023 at 2:41:41 PM

ignore

Edited by ZuggaluggalocoroG on Aug 15th 2023 at 7:32:36 AM

I now hear "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band at my work at least twice a day - I got sick of it pretty quickly and decided to have my "revenge" via a quick shitpost cover. The beat is from a bandlab sample pack, the vocals are my poor Dave Matthews impression run through a "sampler" feature from the app.

I also don't think I posted the latest Witches of the 70s mini-album - Poston Bops, so-called because I stealth-dropped it the night of July 4th this year. I think I posted about half of of these tracks individually in the thread though.

Edited by MikeK on Aug 16th 2023 at 4:13:39 AM

oh right this thread exists-

i have nothing right now but i am planning on making an ambient pop/hypnagogic pop album based off of internetcore. when i get a single actually done instead of procrastinating and wasting my life away like usual i'll probably post it here

I'd actually like 2 listen 2 that. Sounds neat.

that "Fake Band Project" album (where my goal was to make an album by myself that played like a various artist compilation) is considered finished - albeit mostly because I did an Overly Long Gag / Shallow Parody of Slowcore at the end. "HoOSha!" even has roots on this very forum - a thread where people were trying to deliberately make bad music somehow led me to the combination of fake bongos, unintelligible screaming, and unstable-sounding laughter.

Playing back this track, I can tell I've come quite a ways since I began as a musician.