Bootlegs, Mashups, Re-edits & Remixes: What’s The Difference?

Whether you play music that’s labelled “bootleg”, “mashup”, “re-edit” or “remix” and have wondered what these terms mean, or you’re dabbling yourself in altering or making your own versions of tunes that you own, you may have wondered what the differences are between these often-used labels. Over the past few weeks, several students on our courses have asked about these differences – so here I’m going to talk you through each one individually and explain what marks them apart from each other.

Re-edits – quick and dirty!

Re-edits are the closest to the original song that you’re likely to find, and the ones you’re likely to have a go at making yourself – at least at first.

A re-edit is simply a version of a track that’s had small changes made to it that could have been done by anyone (by that I mean that anyone could have taken the released version of the track to make the changes).

Why would you do this? Usually, to make it easier to DJ with or dance to – the big thing here is that you’re using the finished version of the record as your starting point.

Indeed, this is something that you can do (and DJs often DO do) live by using cue points and quantise features in DJ software to jump around in tracks, effectively performing a slightly different version of a track spontaneously in front of an audience.

No surprise, then, that some DJ software has started to incorporate ways of doing this. For instance, if you’re a Serato user, look into the Serato Flip function, which essentially remembers things you do with your cue points and lets you play back those “live re-edits” as a kind of pre-recorded version next time.

If you’re a Rekordbox Creative or Pro user, there is an edit function, which lets you chop up and re-organise the parts of songs and save them out as actual new versions to play in your sets – without ever leaving your DJ software.

Read this next: 7 Apps For Making Quick Re-Edits, Mashups & Bootlegs

However, whether you do them live or ahead of time, in these platforms or indeed in some of the more traditional editing platforms such as Ableton Live, the point is that you’re using the finished version of the song and making small, relatively straightforward changes to that version of the song, almost certainly simply to make them easier or better to DJ with.

Late Nite Tuff Guy’s superb re-edit of Toto’s “Africa”. This is an extreme example of a re-edit that goes a bit further than just extending the intro or adding some beats at the end to mix out of, but essentially it falls into the “re-edit” category, because while in this case it is a LOT longer than the original, it retains all the same sections.

Mashups – surprising your audiences

Moving up the chain, so to speak, the next more involved way of changing pre-recorded songs is by “mashing them up”.

The key thing here is that more than one song is involved – so whereas a re-edit involves us taking a single track and doing something to it, a mashup involves doing the same but melding different songs together (indeed, some mashups use multiple tracks, not just two).

We’re still typically using the finished versions of tracks that anyone can get their hands on, because mashups are usually unofficial, but we are cleverly altering them and crucially “mashing them up” in order to create something new.

Nowadays, with real-time stem separation inside DJ software allowing us to do things like take the vocals from one track and the music from another, it’s incredibly easy to create these things live in much the same way as we can create re-edits of songs live. But equally, we can use similar features to create them ahead of time in more traditional production software.

The mashup scene began many years ago as a somewhat ironic, knowing, tongue-in-cheek way of taking often surprising track choices and making them work together. And while its popularity has arguably waned, a well-conceived mashup dropped at the right time in a DJ set is still a killer trick.

One of the most famous mashups of all time – The Strokes Vs Christina Aguilera, “A Stroke Of Genie-us”

Bootlegs – because it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission!

“Bootleg” has illegal connotations, right? Back in the day, bootleg albums were releases of entire live shows (usually) done by fans, away from the record labels entirely.

But in a DJ context, a bootleg is where you radically change an existing song – for instance, to make a version of it in a completely different genre or at a different tempo, or to fundamentally change its feel. While it goes further than a re-edit, again you don’t have access to the studio source materials.

This is now moving into the realm of music production, because a lot of the things you’ll be doing will involve what producers do: Programming beats, adding basslines, and bringing in completely new elements that didn’t exist in the original recording, for instance.

However, the key thing about a bootleg is not so much that it’s illegal (although selling bootlegs that you haven’t got the necessary clearances for is going to get you into trouble), but more that you didn’t ask for permission, and so you didn’t have access to the original master recordings to work with.

In other words, you started off with the finished versions of the song, just like with re-edits or mashups.

The difference from a simple re-edit is that with a bootleg, you went much further, changing the source material radically, usually adding whole elements yourself that weren’t part of the original.

There have been plenty of extremely successful bootlegs that have been officially licensed and released – we’ve had students at Digital DJ Tips who’ve made bootlegs of songs that ended up being endorsed by the original artists, so this is a legitimate way of showing off your production skills without having to start with a completely clean sheet (because the starting point is someone else’s material).

(And by the way, if you’re just playing it in your DJ set, there’s normally no legal problem as well, although don’t quote me on that, I’m not a lawyer…)

Read this next: 5 Bootlegs & Mashups That Became Global Hits

DJ Zinc’s bootleg mix of The Fugees’ “Ready Or Not” – one of my chosen “end of night” curveballs back in the day!

Remixes – where producers get to play with other people’s work

Remixes are simply fully authorised new versions of songs made by producers, who will have added lots of their own elements to often radically change the songs.

This is where a producer will be given the original song by the record label or the artist, and be given permission to do something totally new with it. In this instance, they will have access to all the original project files, samples, recordings, and so on.

This is the closest step to being a full-on music producer, because you’re using the same tools, software and skills, but somebody else has started the track for you, so to speak – your job is to take their work and build on it. No surprise that successful producers often also make successful remixers.

Remixes have long been the way that an original song is turned into versions that can work for all kinds of audiences and on all kinds of dancefloors, and quite often, the “producers of the day” will end up remixing all the most popular artists at any given time. Indeed, when a new song is released, it’s unlikely that it won’t be released nowadays without several fully authorised remixes.

One of my favourite remixes of all time – Timo Maas’s remix of Azzido Da Bass’s “Dooms Night”. The original is utterly unknown in comparison.

Get the skills: Laidback Luke’s Bootlegs, Mashups & Re-edits Course

Finally…

I’m sure you’ve realised that the boundaries between these categories do blur somewhat.

A re-edit may simply use the drums from another song, which means (arguably) it’s a mashup, although not one most people would recognise as such.

A bootleg may use convincingly extracted stems from the original song, and therefore, quality-wise, be indistinguishable from an official remix.

And a skilled DJ using cue points to jump around a track live in a DJ set might never consider that what they’re actually performing is effectively a re-edit – although really, it is!

But hopefully, this has helped you to understand the historical differences between all these different ways of taking a single finished recording and turning it into all kinds of different versions that can be useful for us DJs.