The following post originally appeared on attractmo.de, on July 30, 2014.
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We’ve all heard the same sounds bites of clueless newscasters and religious zealots, warning parents everywhere of the danger that is the Pokemon craze, literally a thousand times. But set to The Jackson 5? That’s news to me!
As is Neil Cicierega, who apparently is the new hot thing on the internet. I only just heard about the guy via a fine pal up north, Robby Duguay, who asked how he could get such clear stems to work from.
I simply figured he knew people who at record companies, specifically those who prep songs for karaoke. But then some lite Googling led me to this recent Fast Company article about Cicierega, in which reveals a far more curious (and surprisingly video game related) source:
“I found all these collections of the raw instrument tracks from all these songs–a lot of them were from the game Rock Band. People had taken the data from that game and turned them into unofficial remix packs of the songs… Once I found this huge collection, I was like, ‘Oh, I can sift through this and have fun all I want,’ so I just started downloading dozens and dozens of songs, and pairing them up randomly to see if anything would work.”
So all you mashup mixmasters out there can thank Harmonix for going to such great lengths and procuring the raw material for you to mess with.
