Masups provide us with some of the most fun and entertaining music available today, if you are wondering "What is a Mashup" then I shall briefly explain:  a Mashup is a music composition composed entirely from tracks that have already been recorded.  For example you might choose to mix up The Beatles with a modern thumping dance track, or take the lyrics from an Eminem release and ix it over some light folk music.  Throughout the history of music there has always been a case for borrowing from other people's work, this has always gone on, and the mashup is the modern extension of this.

The modern home mixer is released from any constraints placed on them, from the comfort of your own home you can mix up and put together whatever you like and enjoy your own creativity.  Of course releasing your work is a whole other matter and the subject of a another article.  For now we will look at how to mix up two tunes.

What do you need?

Hardware: Fortunately, if you are reading this on your home computer, you already have the main ingredient for modern music creation.  Generally most artists will recommend working on a Windows based machine as this provides ease of access to the software you are going to use.  Any half decent PC bought in recent years will be perfectly capable of running the spftware you need to create your masterpieces!

Mashup Software: There are two key packages here:

• Sony's ACID Pro is the key pieve of software here and as luck would have it there is a free version available from here.  The free version has some limitations placed upon it but this should not stop you being able to do what you need to do.  For example ACID XPress only allows 10 tracks but this shouldn't be a problemm for all but the most complicates setups.
• The second piece of your toolkit is Adobe's Audition.  This is a sound editing package and will come in useful if you need to clean up tracks, for example if you want to extract the vocals from the background music.  A trial version is available but if the full version is out of your price range then don't worry, you can get started with Sony's ACID Xpress.

The ideal tracks for your Mashup

• An acappella track is one where the vocals are included but with no other background sounds.  If you are lucky your artist of choice will have released an acappella version of the song you want to mix into your mashup.  Historically these were available on the b-sides of records on burried at the end of a CD single.  In the new Internet age it is easy to search music download services such as iTunes for such tracks.
• On the flip side, it is often also possible to get your favourite tracks in an instrumental version, so this is the same track but this time the vocals have been removed.