Nightcore? Read this.

[Digideath]

Hi there. I'm a 36yo guy from Scotland. A long time (just over 2 decades) mixer, remixer and dj that used to play around locally. I gave it up for a good few years (got married, became a dad) but started listening to a lot of the nightcore stuff circulating youtube. I'm a big fan of a lot of it. Love it really. Got me inspired to dust off my equipment and get back into it. There in lies one of many problems that led me here to talk to you because at first I thought you were all doing what we do.

Look, what you guys call nightcore, we did VERY similar sounding stuff back in the late 90's, early 2000's and way beyond, hence the reason why I like what you do so much. Even started mixing and remixing again because of it but shock and horror, I'm told it's not full proper nightcore. Confused as, i started looking around to figure out why. Reading the description on here, its easy to understand why peeps think this. But hear me out on this. Let me describe in detail what we did and still do.

First of were not commercial or club (although I played a few local clubs and broadcast over radio many a time). We were the west coast undergrounds underground. We met up at places like the carpark in the sky or the banks of the local loch for example. Even out in the woods. Hundreds of us at times. Random desolate meet areas to do "illegal" all-nighter raves.
We don't use wav editors or audacity or anything like that (only in later days to clean up recordings for selling locally as mix tapes/cds for example.) We do it live on decks. Most times back then, hooked into car batteries and such. I favour the triple deck layout with further additions of cd decks as well etc. As the equipment became available.
We sit with around 2 or 3 copies of the same track on vinyl or cd, mainly hardcore or happy hardcore and later trance.
Sure we speed them up. Not straight pitch shifting only like you do. We operate the tempo and pitch independently. The secret to what we do was always to get the speed as fast as without it skipping or distorting or running into itself and wrecking the track. Then pitch it up to around about the same sound as you use for nightcore. Most importantly is finding the right sounding key at the higher pitch otherwise it's wrecked to us.
We dont just speed up a track to the right sound and play that. That was always considered a bit cheap and nasty locally. A half job. We always remix them.
A lot of the tracks from back then, for example, had one half just music, the other half vocal. We would cut just the music half out then remix using the vocal segments for example. We remix full tracks from it often crossing and overlaying additionally samples and instrumental sections from the same track to make the complete track. Some times we even mash in segments from other tracks to this as well.
Remember we do this live, at fast speeds, on decks and always cross mix and go non stop for hours.

The end result of all that was something that's def up lifting, faster and happier. It sounds very, very, VERY close to the style of most of the nightcore stuff I've listened to. Now I'm not saying we invented nightcore. The method is very different but the result is so similar, its hard to believe you can class it any different and that's my point here. The resulting style and sound IS almost identical. Remember it's not the method that signifies a genre but rather the style and sound of the result. It's always been that way. Really its all messed up and backwards to me. I'm so freaking confused right now. End of but, I do still love a lot of the nightcore vids I've been listening to.


What are your thoughts on this? If you would like, I have a brilliant remix example of this I just practiced with and recorded that I can upload on to youtube. Ok it's a track from 1996 but listen to the resulting remix and compare it with the original track. Thats one thing. Lets you hear how its done. I would also challenge anyone to say it sounds significantly different enough from nightcore to justify it being called a completely different thing all together.

[Raver]

Well man, we just try to guide the Nightcore community to what we think it's the best and most truthful.

Since the beginning of raves and electronic parties the pitch/speed/tempo/whatever has been used by the djs so they could mix songs better. It's nearly impossible to find out who was the first to speed up songs and we all know that, however the thing which captivated us (or at least most of us) was the original nightcore songs, that's why we "praise" the band/genre.

The timeline of this community starts roughly from the first nightcore song, it doesn't matter if someone has done it before at all. Also most of the nightcore uploaders don't claim their uploads a creation of them. Mostly we just mix as you did 20 years ago but in a simple and easier way and share on youtube. Simple as that.

Sure, upload your mixes, we have a lot of fans of hardcore here (including myself) and call them w/e you want dude, not a big deal, except if they aren't dance/techno at all.

[Digideath]

Very much appreciated my friend. This is the net. Some people could have laid in for a post like that. Was a bit nervy that people would. :)

Yep it's almost impossible to tell who started speeding it all up. Locally we started doing it because a: we heard bootleg mixes with tracks speeded up that sounded good and b: because we started playing with it ourselves to make stuff sound better. I wouldn't ever say we started doing it first. Still to this day I, at the very least, up the tempo of most of the stuff I listen to.

Will do. Got one ready. Just doing the convert to movie file then the upload. Will post in the right section when done. I'm interested to hear what peeps on here think of this.