The Beatles feat. Dexter Holland – “Obla-Job”
I had some fun the last few days bringing together The Offspring’s “Why don’t you get a job” and The Beatles’ “Obla-di Obla-da” after noticing that the songs are quite similar.
To cut to the chase, here’s the video:
So just to recount all the software used (all free except FL Studio):
First, to get all the assets needed from YouTube, I used Youtube-dl.
I needed a way to separate the vocals from the accompaniment on both songs. After looking around a bit, I came across the amazing, recently-released Spleeter by Deezer. Compared to other free solutions, it’s awesome.
The songs are at different tempos and keys, so to rectify that, I used Audacity. The vocals of Dexter Holland had to be sped up from 108 to 113 BPM. The songs are 5 semitones apart, so I raised the vocals (Offspring) 2.5 semitones and lowered the accompaniment (Beatles) 2.5 semitones, getting them to meet in the middle.
After that, I imported the audio into FL Studio, where I chopped up the vocals with Edison to add them to the playlist and match them up with the accompaniment. It turns out The Beatles did not record with click tracks, so this work was quite finicky. I started doing this work in Audacity, but it was quite painful to move bits around and align them, though it could probably have been done.
Finally I used the brilliant Lightworks to edit the video, which involved chopping up footage from The Offspring’s music video and a Beatles’ video for Penny Lane (there is surprisingly little footage of The Beatles publicly available).
Anyway, that was fun. Hope you enjoy it!
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