#THE LINES FIT THEM SO WELL I. AAAAAAAAA

[stevens-pastrami-sandwich]

"shoutout to e for being patient zero" no probs matt! any day pal! 😁😁 (help me can somebody hear me please hel

crying screaming throwing up

[chongoblog]

[Blocked] for Your Sanity Analysis

In light of Deltarune today, I thought I'd look back on a mashup I made when Chapter 2 dropped, that being [Blocked] For Your Sanity.

So if we don't count the backing track of BIG SHOT, this song uses 12 different audio sources. Thats roughly 1 new sample every 12 seconds (a pretty good pace. Side note: I'm gonna have to look into the mashup rates of some of my other mashups, just because I love Numbers)

Of these 12 samples, I can cite specific reasons for adding almost every single one of them! The only one I can't think of is "Mambo No. 5", which I think ended up being added because the melodic rhythm lined up well (similar to HHGregg in Mad Rat Purgatory).

So first, we can clear a lot of these in one, because this mashup is actually a direct sequel! If you didn't know, I mad a mashup with "NOWS YOUR CHANCE TO BE A" called "[Blocked] For Your Safety". And every song that was used in Safety is reused here. Those songs being "I Want You", "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems", "Wannabe", and "Macarena". All of those were chosen because all four of them were on the Billboard Year-End Top 100 List for [[1997]].

So that's 4 songs out of the way! We can eliminate a few more by looking back at previous mashups, mostly at Behindtale. "You Spin Me Right Round" and HHGregg were included as a reference to THE JAM REVOLVING (with HHGregg getting special attention due to this coming out a few months after Mad Rat Monday). Some people in the comments speculated that it was some kind of reference to Spamton's character and how it's not too dissimilar to Mad Rat's in a way, and while that wasn't the intent, it's a fascinating perspective. THIS is the kind of shit that makes me love what I do. I plant the seed that you can analyze mashups for a deeper meaning. Then you have people who see that deeper meaning, even where you didn't intend to, giving them a deeper and sometimes even more personal connection to the music. FUCK I love creating. Anyway, "The Hero!!" and "Anthropology" were added as references to Pony! and Power of a Punch from Behindtale, since the motifs from Undertale re-emerge in this theme.

And on this note I want to take a moment to say that I'm frothing at the mouth to one day make a Deltarune album. Because Toby's use of motifs gels REALLY well with my style of mashups. I'm not sure when I would do it or how I would arrange it all, but I wanna make it happen (along with all the other stuff I wanna do aaaaaaaaa)

So that leaves 3 more songs, which are meant to reflect Spamton specifically, and his feeling of being trapped. "I've Got No Strings" is the clearest puppet allegory I could find in a song (I know Master of Puppets exists, but a Master Spamton is not). "This is Gospel" is a song that functionally works really well in mashups because its chorus is mostly one long held word, so you don't have to worry about it making the lead vocals confusing. But for this one it works doubly well, since the lyrics heard are "LET ME GO". And finally, "Locked Out Of Heaven" is almost punishingly fitting for Spamton.

That's the reasoning out of the way. In terms of production notes, you can start to see a more remix-inspired style start to really rise up with this mashup. A lot of the audio tracks are cut down and have small bits repeated (most notably, Wannabe, Macarena, and I Want You). Someone in the comments pointed out that at 1:55 there are 4 songs playing over each other and it still works! The repetition is part of what makes this work so well! I start by looping "I need you, I want you", which is a very simple loop. Once you have that going for a couple loops, the listener gets it, and since the loop is like half a second, you're SPEEDRUNNING that familiarity. Then I do the same thing with "Mambo No. 5", which I put on top of the melody playing. This acts to sort of place Mambo No. 5 as part of the backing track.

You see, my theory with mashups is that when people generally listen to a song, they subconsciously divide it into its musicality and its lyrics. The musicality side of the brain is abstract and can absorb a good bit, especially if you build on it over time (with overlaying melodies and such). The lyrical side of your brain is less talented, because if you try to tell it two new sets of words at the same time, its a bit too much. The tradeoff is that it makes a of of this kind of analysis, so I guess it levels out. So how do you make it so that you can play a bunch of songs at once without the lyric side going into a fit? That's where the repetition comes in! If you can get a phrase to repeat enough, then the lyric side of your brain sorta goes "okay, yeah I got that. There's not much by new information to worry about" and it sort of moves it over to the musicality half of the brain to process. At that point it doesn't process what it's saying, but it doesn't need to. You already know. And the best part is that musicality half LOVES it when you can seamlessly put familiar stuff with other familiar stuff (it's why mashups are so fun in the first place). That way you can add lyrics bit by bit, and suddenly you have three people singing at once, but you can still make sense of it!

I'll probably share some finer technical tips for how to do that stuff in a future post, but this one's gone on for quite a bit already