RootsMiller

The project

What this is

Thirty-eight mashups. Mac Miller's vocals over classic roots reggae instrumentals. Not a playlist, not a blend set — every one of these was built from the ground up.

Each pairing is matched by key and by tempo, by hand, so the vocal actually sits in the record instead of fighting it. The tempos are measured off the audio rather than trusted from a tag, because tags round and the drift adds up. And at the end of every edit, the original reggae record comes back in at a real section boundary and plays itself out — no fade, no cold cut.

Mac was Pittsburgh. Roots reggae is the other half of the room. This is what happens when you put them in the same record and take the craft seriously.