Reading between the Grooves: A Celtic Mashup

Anything goes on Saturday and I spent the entire evening last night constructing a mashup of traditional inspired music -- mostly Celtic in origin; however, Loreena McKennitt’s “All Souls Night” is an original tune and I believe “A Maid that’s deep in Love” is of English origin. The process required me to put four songs together into one medley of tunes or a mashup. The songs are as follows in order of appearance.

Loreena McKennitt – “All Souls Night”
The Corrs – “Lough Erin Shore”
Pentangle – “A Maid that’s deep in Love”
Haley Westenra – “She Moved through the Fair”

I discovered Haley Westenra’s wonderful version of “She Moved through the Fair” when I featured the Sinéad O’Conner’s version a few weeks ago. Since my wife wouldn’t listen to O'Connor's version, I decided to use another and I liked the instrumentation found in Haley Westenra’s video. It wasn’t until after I recorded the mashup that I noticed that the video was something that another You Tube contributor produced and it wasn’t a commercial video. Oh well, it was nicely done and I am not going to redo this mashup.

Finally, since the “A Maid that’s deep in Love” had no video other than static photos, I used a video track from another Pentangle song “House Carpenter” to give the illusion that Jacqui McShee was actually singing. I didn’t try to get this perfect, as I just wanted to do at least one mashup – and after 10 hours, I got this out of my system.

A couple of events inspired me to do this. When I discovered the Corrs’ version of “Lough Erin Shore,” I recognized that it was very similar to Pentangle’s version of “A Maid that’s deep in Love.” I was familiar with that song from the LP "Cruel Sister," the only Pentangle album that I own. With the similarities, I began contemplating the possibility of combining the two songs. The second inspiration was a mashup by a gentleman named Peter Bull but goes by the name of Norwegian Recycling. His video “How Six Songs Collide” was the second inspiration.

Here’s Norwegian Recycling’s “How Six Songs Collide.”

To make this video, I used Ask.com’s video converter, Sony Vegas Video, and Sony Sound Forge. When stringing the songs together, I needed unified theme and this was the frequent use of the rebec and hurdy-gurdy from “All Souls Night.” There were some problems with the Ask converter, as several of the videos had dropouts and it would not let me re-record these particular videos – so I improvised by editing some of these.

Here are the original videos I used.

Loreena McKennitt – “All Souls Night”