// Bootlegging //

[System.S]

The bootleg is an essential part of dance music culture, with current hits and old favourites being constantly reworked to keep the sounds on the dancefloor fresh. Here’s how it's done.

Bootlegs: black vinyl, white label, grey area. While ‘unofficial’ (read: unauthorised and, strictly speaking, illegal) remixes of current chart hits, or cut & paste mash-ups of two popular tunes, are officially frowned upon by the record industry, they’re also an important part of dance music culture.

Every time ‘Big Ibiza Tune’ is starting to wane, the inevitable rash of ‘Big Ibiza Tune Vs Blah Blah Blah’ booties keep it alive, while many’s the R&B songstress whose profile would be considerably lower had her voice not found its way, via the bootleg, onto garage, drum & bass and house dancefloors across the land. And there’s many a booty that’s ended up as an official release just ask Richard X or the guys behind the D&B mixes of Goldtrix’s ‘Trippin’’.

That’s not to say making your own bootleg is without its dangers, and anyone embarking on the process should be aware of the risks and possible legal implications involved. But if you’re convinced you’ve got an idea for a booty that’s going to slay them on the floor, how do you go about it?

The very first step is inspiration. There could be several reasons for making your own bootleg. Maybe you love a hip hop track and want to use the lyrics over a drum & bass tune; maybe, through DJing, you’ve found that the beats of one track and the bassline of another go together really well and want to hear how it sounds as one; maybe you want to do an update of one of your all-time favourite tracks or perhaps you just want to do a cheeky underground version of a chart hit.

Whatever your motive, be clear of what you hope to achieve and how you want your track to sound. The next stage is then to find the raw materials for your bootleg and head to the studio to get to work.

Depending on your level of experience, you may create the track entirely on your own, or if you are just a DJ with a head full of ideas, you may find you save hundreds of painstaking hours by enlisting the help of an engineer (or if funds are limited, perhaps a friend who has more experience in production). The most basic and raw method is of course to chop up the two tracks live on turntables, but the quality is unlikely to be good enough for any proper use.

Whichever method you choose, you’re somehow going to have to get hold of the elements you wish to use as the raw material for your bootleg. If you’d been asked to do an official remix, you would have been supplied with all the original song’s individual parts by the label/artist, but as your version is ‘unofficial’, that isn’t going to happen. But in some cases, the acapellas and samples from chart-bound tracks do become available, possibly suggesting that the label behind it are actively encouraging underground mixes to aid in promoting the main release.

Found sounds
One of the best resources for the modern producer is the world wide web: there are hundreds of websites packed with .WAV files and MP3s of breaks, beats, sounds, vocals and full tracks that you can use as the building blocks for your creation. File-sharing programmes such as Kazaa or LimeWire are also very handy for tracking down hard-to-find tracks or instrumental mixes.

Alternatively, you may wish to sample from vinyl or CD, which can be done with a hardware sampler or using software on your computer. Many records have instrumental mixes and acapellas which are exactly what you need for bootlegs. If you’re trying to lift the vocals from a track and can’t get hold of just the vocal acapella, you can try to sample the original track and then clean it up; however, this can be a difficult process, and can be restricting as you may need to disguise certain parts of the record. This is achieved by clever EQing, masking, and mixing out the low frequencies.

Once you have your raw material, wave editing software such as Peak or Sonic SoundForge will then allow you to view the track/sound source as a waveform, enabling further editing, looping, time stretching/pitch shifting and vocal re-arrangements etc. There are many of these sound editing applications available, with varying levels of difficulty and functionality.

If you choose to use wave editor software, you are also going to need to use of some kind of Digital Audio Multitracking Software. This enables you to arrange the elements of your track into one unit, re-arrange all your different parts, and add effects such as reverb or EQ. The most popular sequencers of this kind are Emagic’s Logic Audio, Steinberg’s Cubase VST and Digidesign’s Pro Tools.

Okay, so we’ve explained how to get your source material and what studio kit you’ll need – now it’s time to get to work! For ease of explanation, let’s assume we’re making a track using a vocal acapella from a popular soul tune over a brand new original house track, with a few classic funk guitar samples thrown in for good measure. In this scenario, you’ll know the tempo of your house tune but the acapella and other samples may not be the same.

So once all of your sounds have been loaded into your sequencing software, you’ll have to make use of time-stretching and match the tempos of your backing track, guitar loops and the acapella vocal. The time-stretching method will depend on which application you are using: you should be able to choose the original tempo and the desired tempo, otherwise just use ratios of tempos or make all of your loops exactly the same length, conserving their pitch.

Now it’s just a case of chopping up and arranging the track as you wish, editing sections and making it sound how you desire. As with any type of production, ensure that everything sounds right together in the mix, with each part’s individual volume set at the correct level without being too loud and overbearing. Production quality is everything: if it sounds terrible, then obviously nobody will want to play it!

Vinyl solution
After several hours in the studio, you proudly emerge with the finished track (which you probably think is an anthem), but before you spend any money and commit to vinyl, it’s worth getting some feedback as to what everyone else thinks. Test the water by playing it to friends, other music fans, DJs and possibly even the guy in your local record shop. Another good way of seeing what the general public thinks is by getting the track up on a website and linking it to a dedicated message board such as Get Ur Bootleg On.

Make sure you put your contact email address on the site, too, and take note of any comments you receive. If the feedback suggests it hasn’t been well received, then don’t waste your time pressing it on to vinyl. If you have belief in the track, by all means burn and send CDs out to DJs to try and gain further support, but it would be silly to risk ending up with a load of records that nobody wants. If your feedback is positive and you decide to continue, though, then the next stage is getting the track mastered and turned into a stack of white labels.

There are two ways this could happen. Firstly, you can do it all yourself: pay for the vinyl pressing and then approach distributors or shops with your records to try and sell them. Alternatively, you could get a distributor to do a P&D (pressing & distribution) deal on the track, where they manufacture the record and also take care of the distribution. With general releases, this is done either for a one-off fee or for an agreed percentage of the revenue; with bootlegs it’s generally going to be a one-off amount.

Be warned that some pressing companies will refuse to deal with bootlegs, which is understandable as the vinyl is easily traceable back to them. Indeed, many pressing plants require you to be registered with MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) in order to manufacture your record. However, there are plenty of shady characters in the music industry so you’re sure to find someone who will be happy to help before too long!

Firstly, you’ll need to prepare your track by getting it mastered. Although there is a huge amount of mastering software available, it’s always better to get it done professionally by an experienced engineer. A decent mastering studio will charge roughly £200 to master and prepare a one-sided 12â€

[divine_mz]

omg me read all dat ya rite m out of here:P

[3aly]