Well now, it's about time I 'blew the scoop on the making of my DIE songs, because you lot are very impatient and stupid enough not to realise that I had actually commented on how I made them several times on some of the videos themselves.

For those of you who are smart enough to stay away from the whole 'youtube poop' phenomenom, DIE songs are songs in which the main tunes or lyrics are simply replaced with clips of Ganon and Gwonam from the embarrasing Cd-i Zelda games saying "die." In later songs I added in the shopkeeper saying "bombs" and the king saying "ohh" and "for". If it sounds stupid thats probably because it is, but a number of people go crazy for them. I'm not going to name any names. *cough mycatisbigfoot cough*


Thing is, DIE songs are very, very quick to make and you don't need any skill to make them. It doesn't take hours like a number of people have speculated, so I get this weird feeling when people say things like "Man you must have too much free time" No. Unless 5 minutes is too much free time. Making a DIE song takes far less time than making even a short youtube poop. It's not uber-talent, it's just an original idea. Well, it was original, at least, when I made the first lot of DIE songs at christmas 2007. So anyway, here's what I do...

STEP 1: GET THE SOUND CLIP YOU WANT
This is obvious and shouldn't need any explanation, unless you're one of those idiots who hasn't found out how to download clips from youtube yet. So I just use whatever applications I like to get the sound clip I want for the song, namely TubeTV for downloading the video and QuickTime for cutting it down to just the sound I want, and I get to the point where I've exported the clip as a sound file.

STEP 2: MATCH THE PITCH OF THE SOUND CLIP TO EACH NOTE
So basically what I do is export the individual sound with a slightly different pitch each time so that it fairly accurately matches each musical note. Sounds tedious, but I found that it doesn't take as long as you may think- 5 to 10 minutes depending on how many notes you want to do. I use Audacity, and change the pitch by 1 semitone each time. I'm sure there are quicker ways but who cares.

STEP 3: MAP THE NOTES TO AN INSTRUMENT-MAKER THINGY
This doesn't take as long as it sounds either. As a Mac person I go onto Garageband and open up one of the instruments where you can change the notes (I think they're all under sound effects.) If you go onto 'Musical Typing' you'll find that by simply dragging and dropping a sound file onto the on-screen note you will have mapped it to it. So do this for all the notes, check it sounds ok and then save the instrument. I think this means you can now delete the individual sounds on your computer, and it will still have them all saved in Garageband. But don't take my word for that.

STEP 4: GET A MIDI OF THE SONG YOU WANNA DO
Or if you're good with music you could make the song yourself. But I'm not. So I find a midi of the song I feel like doing, download it, drag and drop into Garageband and voila, it should import the midi into it and allow you to do what you like to it. If you're not using Garageband I know there are a million and one programs for PC that allow you to import midis. But don't ask me.

STEP 5: CHANGE INSTRUMENTS TO YOUR CUSTOM ONES
Simply change the instruments from the midi to your new custom instruments from step 3, and hit play, and hopefully it'll sound pretty good. Of course it could sound like complete shit, but you can always play around with it to get it sounding how you want. Or maybe you really messed up with changing the pitch of each note in step 2, in which case, you idiot! Go back and try it again. If you managed to make it real good, then good! Save it, export it, and maybe go upload it and see if people flock to it like they did to mine.

Yeah thats right, I don't mind if you go off and make your own 'DIE' songs or 'insert any other word here' songs, as long as you credit me for the idea and perhaps link to me. But if you deliberately upstage me to the point where people stop subscribing to me, then I will hunt you down and you will DIE.