Forgot About Olivia 1️⃣1️⃣

Olivia Rodrigo x Dr. Dre

Song	Vampire	Forgot About Dre
Artist	Olivia Rodrigo	Dr. Dre
Year	2023	2000
BPM	66	67
Part	Acapella	Instrumental

Final Cut

UPDATE: 2023 | December.7 | 06:32 UTC

I further chopped the acapella in a few key segments to further sync the tracks. These subtle touches help to further quantize Rodrigo’s vocals to the beat.

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For this track, I was checking out the Billboard Hot 100, and many tracks by Olivia Rodrigo were on the list, including Vampire at the number 1 spot in October 2023. I never heard the song before, so I looked it up. I was up for the challenge of using the Dr. Dre instrumental because it was the first track that came to mind at the time. I’m surprised with how my mind can instinctually feel the likeness of the two tracks.

The BPM’s were practically identical, which is why the tracks mix together well. But matching the tempo was actually very hard! I had to meticulously adjust the tempo of the Vampire track, since the first half of the song is raw vocals and piano. The screenshot below shows how I had to manually match the tempo to 66 BPM.

I had to raise the volume of the Forgot About Dre Instrumental one dB. The acapella gets really loud, especially at the end, so I had to gradually lower the dB’s by the third chorus to keep it balanced.

In the original instrumental, there is only one time where the distorted guitars play. In this mix, I chopped up the beat so that it was able to play at least 3 times. Similarly, the “c-c-compton-compton” vocals played only once, but I finessed it into the track at several key breakdown points. Hope you liked it!

This mix took about 6 hours to complete, including its third iteration to have the ideal volume mastering. The acapella track was the most time consuming, as the first half of the song is done originally without a metronome, so the tempo is very unstable.

My favorite part of this mix is each time when the distorted guitars play. It comes during the chorus, when Rodrigo is peaking her vocals.

Tools Used for this mix:

1. My HP laptop running Windows 11.
2. Magix ACID 11 to Beatmap, arrange and mix the audio files.
3. Nero Downloader Ultimate to rip the MP3’s from YouTube.
4. Nero Recode was needed to convert the MP3’s to WAV’s, since my Acid Studio was having trouble opening them.

Fun Fact: After completing the mix, I felt it was just a bit too flat. The way Dre mastered his track didn’t seem to go right with the Vampire vocals. So, I added a 5% Hall Reverb that I think did the trick!