Not to be confused with ‘mashups’, musical medleys involve playing parts from two or more songs in sequence after one another. In doing so they provide a unique musical experience, and odds are you’ve heard medleys in the past involving the best songs from a year, or bits of songs from several movies.
Aside from that there are really no hard and fast rules for creating musical medleys – which is fitting considering the word literally means ‘a jumbled assortment’. That being said there are ways that you can compile more interesting musical medley experiences:
Find a theme
Good musical medleys are structured around a central theme, which could be a particular artist, style, or even content. For example you could create a musical medley involving songs that talk about love, or submarines, or anything else for that matter.
Focus on the last song first
Although song selection is an important part of any musical medley, ideally you should try to focus on the last song. That song is going to be the note that your medley finishes on, and so it should provide a strong conclusion that wraps up the theme.
Use the opening song to establish the theme
In much the same way the last song will wrap up the theme, the first song should establish it. To do that it needs to be a song that strongly relates to the theme, so that it can set the tone of the medley.
Understand how to modulate key changes (or use music in the same key)
Arguably the trickiest part of compiling a musical medley is the fact that you’ll be dealing with multiple pieces of music in different keys. While fully understanding how to modulate key changes can be tricky, as a rule you should try to only shift the original key up or down a tone – so as to preserve its sound.
If you don’t understand how to modulate key changes, the best way around that is to just select music that uses the same key.
Pick specific parts of songs to accelerate of decelerate the tempo into the next
Invariably the tempo of some of the songs you choose will vary, and the while you could artificially increase or decrease the tempo of the music – that won’t sound great. Instead the best approach is to choose specific parts of the song where the tempo accelerates or decelerates naturally as required, and use it to shift into the tempo of the next song more smoothly.
All that you really need to create an interesting musical medley is a music merger and Movavi Video Editor will serve well on that front. It will let you combine songs together easily, and it even has tools that will let you edit audio tracks so you can tweak them and make them sound better.
As a video editor, you could use it to add video footage to your music medley as well, and merge clips together, trim out unwanted parts, apply effects, and more. In that way Movavi Video Editor could actually let you compile a music video to go along with your medley, which will make it an even more unique experience.