40 Covers of Skrillex

In the spirit of better late than never, I'm releasing a project I did back in 2012, but haven't published until now: 40 Covers of Skrillex.

This originally started as an idea vaguely inspired by Kutiman's Thru-you. At the time, Skrillex covers were really popular on YouTube, especially Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. After hearing a few I started thinking, what if you could remix all those covers together to make a whole new version of the song?

I spent the better part of a day just listening to and downloading as many covers as I could find, which ended up being about 50. I took a bunch of notes on which instruments were in the cover, sections that I thought sounded particularly good, etc. I started vaguely thinking about how they might fit together, but didn't really anything concrete in mind.

After that, I started loading stuff into Reaper. Originally I was thinking I'd do the audio editing there and then figure out the video afterwards, but actually Reaper's video editing was powerful enough for my modest needs. I put in the original track as a reference and just started playing around to see what worked.

The following two days or so just consisted of repeatedly adding new covers, figuring out where they'd fit, listening to the sound of different parts together, getting ideas for what might work well next and then starting the process again. A lot of the best ideas came from just trying something silly to see how it would sound; a particular favourite was the floppy disk + guitar solo.

I'm not entirely sure why I didn't release the video at the time. I definitely wanted to get to 50 covers, but I'm not really sure how I was going to get them or where they would have gone. I was also a little unhappy with the audio; I had to lay a pretty fat compressor over everything because there was such a varied amount of sound, and I thought it sounded kinda muddy in the loud sections.

I've had this project in the back of my head for the last five years. Every now and again I would think "oh, yeah, I should finally get around to fixing whatever's wrong with that and finish it". Funny thing is, when I listened to it, it seemed totally fine. What I ended up uploading was completely unchanged from the version I wasn't ready to release five years ago.