Our First Mash-Up

My eight (almost nine) year-old son has (gee, wonder where it comes from) picked up the music bug. Last week I dug out some old software program I picked up years ago and never bothered installing, a very early version of the Acid music mixing program that has become popular in myriad variations. We've been playing around with loops and home-made tunes, and after a few days decided to try our hands at a mash-up of sorts. As my son's favorite band is Green Day, we opted to play with some Green Day riffs. And as I like to point out to him, many of their riffs are pretty blatant rip-offs (which doesn't make them bad). As a case in point, we played around with Green Day's "Warning," which is a direct and unabashed rehash of the Kinks' "Picture Book" (which, to Green Day's credit, was not one of the Kinks' better known songs, at least until it was recently used by HP [I think it was HP] for a printer commercial).

If you're interested in the results, here's our experiment (a 2 1/2 minute mp3).