Do you watch Black Mirror? No? Then this one is likely to be a bit confusing, and I’m not going to explain why Ashley O exists, looks and sounds like Miley Cyrus, or why she’s singing an obnoxiously poppy rework of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole”. Google it.

Still here? Great. Now, the inspiration for this one is pretty simple. I watched Black Mirror and thought, “Well, somebody must have done that already.” So I looked around. Gave it a few weeks. Looked again. Then I came to the conclusion that I was just gonna have to do this for the internet, since the internet wasn’t doing it for me.

Ashley O vs Nine Inch Nails – “Head On A Roll” (Download)

This was a fun one, since I had the NIN stems to work with. It allowed me a ton of freedom with which sounds to pull in and when… sometimes that’s too much freedom, and I spent a lot of time experimenting with how much was too much. In the end, I let the Ashley O song take center stage and let NIN add some pop, primarily with snares, hats, and eventually some guitar and bass towards the end to kick things into high gear.

The Ashley O version was three semitones higher in pitch than NIN, which I mostly ignored. I changed the pitch of the aforementioned guitars and bassline when they kick in behind the chorus, just to keep from muddying the lyrics. I think it worked fairly seamlessly. I didn’t pitch Trent’s vocals because it gave way too much of a chipmunk effect. I did use a centering process to reduce the echo and reverb on Trent’s vocals to bring them into more atmospheric similarity with Ashley O’s. A minor adjustment, but I feel like it helped make a more cohesive song.

I’m especially proud of repitching a single synth hit that allowed me to extend the intro of the non-video edit of the song. I realized that the hit was made of two notes, and in the version I was trying to replicate without vocals, the notes changed pitch in opposite directions. So I couldn’t simply repitch the entire sample. I instead used the spectral frequency viewer to locate the individual notes, isolated them to new tracks (low, mid, high) then repitched the individual instruments in the sequencer. It worked perfectly, which was a bit of a surprise. So that’s another tool in the shed.

The instrumental for On A Roll took some doing. I was able to recreate some of it (see above) but there are entire sections that are completely obscured by vocals. So I did a little hunting, but couldn’t find an instrumental. I found a few filtered acapellas, ie: not studio acapellas but ones derived from the recording by filtering specific frequencies. It’s an inelegant way to get an acapella, because one often winds up extracting too much music or not enough vocals out of the mix. I found one that reduced the least amount of music, then applied wave inversion to remove the vocals from the full recording. The result was an instrumental that still had the faint echo of the vocals, but most of the music remained intact. I had to re-EQ that track to bring some of the midrange back up, but I feel like it was largely successful.

I made a video for this one, because why not? I used NIN’s live version since the music video for Head Like A Hole is… jarringly different. Also, it is only available in 480p, which would look terrible intercut with the 1080p of the Ashley O video. I also shortened the video version of the song, just so I wouldn’t have to invent another 30 seconds of footage. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but I had a hard time doing something similar with the InSoc/Sister’s of Mercy video, and I used three sources for that. Why complicate matters?

I had time off work, and this took a good chunk of my time for two days. The structure came together quickly, but the details, the levels, EQ, reverb and other processing, took a loooong time. But I feel really good about the outcome. I mean… it’s absurd and weird and not actually good, but I’m happy with it. I set out what I intended to achieve, which is all that matters.