Close-harmony disco

It occurs to me, apropos the aforementioned giant Nazi robot, that the perfect soundtrack for tired 'mech-jockeys whooping it up on the last night of leave before they saddle up their W-28s for the big push over the Rhine would be the Puppini Sisters' version of "I Will Survive".

(Via Metafilter, again.)

This choice of soundtrack would also alert the Doctor and his companion to the fact that they'd slipped into another alternate universe, so they wouldn't be taken unawares when a bunch of Gear Krieg/Ring Of Red action broke out in the area.

(Cap'n Jack'd be having a freakin' ball, of course.)

Do wah diddy

The coolness of SongTapper is very much the outside scoop (it's been around for well over a year, now), but I continue to be amazed at how good it is at picking relatively obscure tunes just from their rhythm.

There I was, wondering what the vaguely-Raymond-Scott-ish tune was that people always seem to use without permission as an accompaniment to video of a Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson contraption when they're not using Powerhouse without permission, so I tried tapping it:

doo doo doo doo dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee doo doo doo doo

Bing! The Tapper told me that it was the unavoidable Danny Elfman's Breakfast Machine theme from Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

(Which I've never watched, because I was not a small child at the appropriate time, and because Pee-wee Herman gives me the creeps. Paul Reubens, I'm fine with, but Pee-wee scares me.)

SongTapper was and is not very useful for classical music - although when I tried to get it to recognise hymns and Beethoven it did have a pleasing tendency to put "I Like Big Butts" high in its list of suggestions.

And, obviously, anything whose main theme has an even and unbroken rhythm ain't gonna get recognised.

But even when it fails, there's usually something good in the list of suggestions.

Posted in Music. 6 Comments »

OoooWEEEooooo...

Listening to 185 different versions of the Doctor Who theme, one after the other, does something to a man. It could be worse, I suppose.

After I downloaded the full Whomix archive, I of course had to listen to them all, so I could figure out which ones to keep. I'd downloaded a few of them individually in the past, but who knows what I might have been missing by not getting the lot of 'em?

That torrent file is not perfectly up to date; newer versions of a couple of the better mixes have come out since then, as have a couple of completely new worthwhile mixes. Most of the mixes lean on the BBC's downloadable samples quite heavily, as you'd expect, but not all of them do.

All official versions of the theme smoothly mixed together, ideal as the soundtrack for the movie in which all of the Doctors (including Rowan and Joanna!) and, what the hell, three Masters and both Romanas get together to prevent the destruction of the universe by, I don't know, 200 foot high Dalek-mecha: Regenerations 2006. A tad long for the normals to tolerate, though, and that mix also makes it even more perfectly obvious to me that the Who theme reached its apogee in the Third Doctor version of Delia's original, when the resonance-sweep start-of-credits cliffhanger screech debuted.

In this modern world, a stereo mix is permissible. But that's all you need.

The current version with Delia samples and orchestral accompaniment is better than the FM-synthesis 80s versions, but that's not saying much.

Version, given the above, that I still wouldn't have minded hearing as the theme for the current series: Positionhigh's remix.

Oh, For Pete's Sake winner: Scooby Who.

Syncopated Version That Doesn't Suck: Time Tunnel v3, which manages some real KLF swagger. It'll be a good soundtrack if the Doctor ever digs the Whomobile out of UNIT's basement and flies it to a nightclub in 1988.

The Alternative Time Mix has some balls on it, too, and also contains a sample of the one moment when Jon Pertwee actually said his famous line (see also).

On the subject of the deadly allure of speech samples, A Trip In Time has the least annoying use of them. You do still really need a little chemical enhancement to really enjoy it, though.

Most phat and buttery bassline: Trial of a Time Rat v2. Shame about the lead that comes along at 0:44.

Dubbiest: The 100% sample-free Jah Humphreys Dr Who Dub Explosion.

Best use of a sonic connection that hadn't previously occurred to you: Acid Wilhelm's Blue Whale Mix.

Most suitable for use in the Doctor Who/The Matrix crossover ("K-9 needs guns. Lots of guns."): Breakbeats in Time and Space. That version's got a bunch of unnecessary voice samples in it. The "12 inch" mix lacks them, but it's not separately listed on the Whomix site. It's in the torrent, though, as "Doctor Who - 12inchbreakbeats.mp3".

Non-Whomix options: Orbital's "Doctor?", Bill Bailey's Belgian jazz version ("Docteur Qui"!), and the downright startling version by "Dean Gray", "Dr Who On Holiday". That last is from the various-artists American Edit mashup album, which was available for direct download for a rather brief period. It is, of course, not hard to find elsewhere.

Primitive (game) music

It's not not easy to remix Pac-Man's music, since it's hardly even a tune. Franz Keller does what he can, with Rave In The Mirror Maze.

Moon Patrol is downright sophisticated in comparison, and I like SpookyBlue's "Road to Tyco Station" remix of that theme. It has an excellent keyboard break, and an intro and outro that bring Arcade Ambience to mind.

Again with the game music

There are two frequently heard ways of doing a game remix. Either you start out with the cheesy SNES/C-64/whatever version and then kick in your modern instruments over the top, or you do a huge trance-anthem build-up for the first two minutes of the track, then introduce The Triumphant Theme, which turns out to be Terra Cresta (?) or something.

A good example of Type 1 is McVaffe and Quasikaotic's McVaffeQuasi Ultimix Tetris remix. An example of the second is R3FORGED's Tetris Thirty Plus Mix.

Only the first of those is "the Tetris theme", more correctly known as the Russian folk song Korobeiniki, and widely covered. Ozma's version is quite famous, and I've also got one allegedly by Mr Bungle.

Kalocin's "Piano Practice Remix" of it is particularly cool, though. It's the special track at the end of his album of C64-ified rock songs, most of the download links for which appear to be broken. You can still find the Tetris mix here, though.

Game music remixes

Are you the kind of music lover who, when you hear the name "Galway", automatically thinks of Martin before you think of his uncle James?

Well, then you presumably already know about OverClocked Remix and RKO and so on. If you don't, you should.

My favourite Galway rework is Slow Poison's Wizball mix, which may not be heard at its best without chemical accompaniment. But it's good anyway.

Richard Westall's Arkanoid title screen mix is decent, too.

But wait, I hear you say - has he somehow forgotton the Comic Bakery soundtrack (hearable in all its original SIDitude in the Java player here)?

No, he has not.