A few weeks ago it was requested that I do a mashup of Radioactive and Royals (my family was on a Pentatonix binge and they happened to cover both songs). I definitely had more fun with this than I thought I would, and it was just challenging enough to still be enjoyable. The most annoying thing about mashups is figuring out a way to isolate the vocals, which is harder than you might think. Sometimes you can find the stems (groups of instruments; e.g. guitar stem, drum stem, vocal stem…) of a song somewhere online, but I had no luck with either track. Luckily, Royals is a pretty simple song, and it sounds like they just used an MPC or drum loop for rhythm. This was good news! Once I searched through the song and found a sample of just the drums (no singing), I was able to work my magic and remove the entire rhythm section. There’s a lot of boring numbers and explanations to go along with that process, but the important part is that I got the isolated vocals I needed.

So sit back, take a listen, and enjoy!