This post is going to be a tutorial on doing mashups using logic pro and some of the tools it has, mainly Flex Time and the ESX24 Sampler. The first thing I want to talk about is house keeping. When you’re doing a mashup, you need every sample or loop to have its own track, sometimes you can make exceptions for loops or samples from the same song, or similar songs, but if you have the power in your computer, I still recommend you put them on different tracks. The reason for this is quite simple, every song is mixed differently, so when doing a mashup of all these different songs, you’re going to have to mix them all differently to get them to work. As well as change their tempo, and their pitch and numerous other things. 
As you can see here I’ve put all my samples/loops on different tracks, and some of them have drastically different settings. Now, collecting samples/loops themselves. Some producers will disagree with my here, but I personally find the best way is to just cut the sample in the arrange window, then test it by looping in the sample editor. This picture below shows the cut file selected, causing it to show up in the sample editor, then by clicking the button with the 2 arrows following each other, then clicking the speaker button next to it, you can hear the loop played in loop. Then its just a matter of some careful listening to get your selection perfect.
Next up is speed and beat editing so that you can get your mashup to sound like everything is at the same speed with beats that sync up perfectly. Logic makes this process very simple with its Flex Time tool. Once you have your loop cut, select the tempo you want your mashup to be at, select the sample you want to move into that tempo, and drag the end into the amount of bars the sample goes for. In this case below, its 4.
Now once the tempo syncing is done, sometimes you’ll find that beats aren’t always perfectly on the beat, so you have to move the beat a little, to do this just select a spot in the loop so that these locators come up, then drag the locators left or right to sync the beat.
Now the final technique for getting the mashup to work is by making sure all your loops and samples are in the same key, this is done pretty easily using the pitch shifter, its just move it up or down as much as you need (it takes some practice finding the right keys but once you get the hang of it it’s easy)
Another technique I like to use in mashups or any kind of modern music production is the stutter, this is also just a simple matter of clipping sections out of an audio file in tempo.
There’s one last technique I use in my mashups, this technique is creating a custom sampler instrument in the ESX24 sampler. What I’ve done here is cut each beat out of a synth riff, saved them as a series of audio files, then imported them into the ESX24 (this is done by opening the synth, clicking edit and dragging in the files.) Then I assigned each of the samples to a note on the keyboard (seen at the bottom of the picture) so that if I played each note in order it would play the riff. This allows you to play the notes in random order and completely reinvent the riff.
To listen to my mashup and hear some of these techniques you find it on soundcloud here.
audiophilesjourney 