Make your own Glee Music Mash-up

It isn't very often that I get caught up in popular mainstream televisions shows, but I have to admit that I have been completely hooked by Glee. I have really enjoyed watching this weekly musical. Waiting for the next season is going to leave a gap in my weekly entertainment that I can only hope the reruns will satisfy, but with no new episodes, maybe I will take a little time and attempt to put together my own music mash-up and mix two songs together with MixPad audio mixing software. I'm under no delusions that it will be as easy to make one seamless song out of two as they make it appear on the TV show--but with a whole summer of waiting for season two ahead, I think it might be a fun project for when the storm clouds come out. Even if the rainy days are few and far between, there should be plenty of time to get the hang of mixing two songs together.

Here are a few tips to get you started after you have chosen the songs that you want to use in your mash-up:

• It can be helpful to have the vocals separated from the instrumental music. Try searching for a cappella versions of your songs. If you can't find a cappella versions, try using WavePad to help you extract the voice, but note this can be a time consuming step to get it right.
  
• Load all of your clips in MixPad. MixPad can import audio from a wide range of formats and even extract audio from video files, so you don't need to worry about converting your audio files first.
  
• You may need to adjust the pitch of one of your two songs to get them into the same key.
  
• Adjust the tempo of one of your songs to match the other for a common beat throughout your arrangement.
  
• Use a drum sample of one of the songs to make a tempo grid marking the beat for your mix and help you place samples of your two songs.
  

If any of you have put together your own musical mash-ups I'd love to hear the tracks you have put together. And if you have any tips on mixing tracks together, please share what you have learned.