Here’s a live rendition of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide And Seek.” It’s introduced by Zach Braff, but don’t let that dissuade you from watching.
Imogen Heap and artificial harmony
January 26th, 2010
Copyright Criminals
January 25th, 2010This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.
Bloom County and Michael Jackson
January 21st, 2010A little late but it took me this long to track down: Steve Dallas channels the King of Pop. Thanks Adam G for scanning this from his extensive Bloom County collection and sending it. Click for full size.
Apache makes you go hmmm
January 17th, 2010DJ Kool Herc likes to say that The Incredible Bongo Band’s version of “Apache” is the national anthem of hip-hop. Its famous drum and percussion break reliably put bodies on the dance floor through hip-hop’s prehistory and has been sampled untold numbers of times. Here’s the break:
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On the left is the record where the break first appeared, and on the right is DJ Kool Herc.
You could also call the Apache break the national anthem of drum n bass and all the other electronic microgenres based on sped up and scrambled hip-hop beats.
How to get web traffic from Google
January 14th, 2010If you want to get your web page noticed but don’t want to spend a lot of money on text ads, your best bet is search engine optimization, or SEO. As of this writing, that mostly means understanding how Google ranks search hits, and adapting your web presence accordingly.
Historically search engine results were based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. The problem is that there are a lot of web pages out there with overlapping keywords. Another problem is that this system is easy to game by loading your pages with invisible text repeating the keywords over and over. Google attempts to rank its search results in the order of their usefulness. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to your page. If more people link to a web site, presumably it’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.
So the key to a higher Google rank is getting inbound links. The question is, how do you get people to link to you?
Resequencing the Funky Drummer’s DNA
January 12th, 2010The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample, but it’s much easier with computers than turntables.
To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling, resequencing, effects and further transformation of the slices.
Below is the loop as seen in Recycle and a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively. Click through to see them bigger:
Open-source music
January 5th, 2010Sample-based music isn’t stealing. It’s valuable and important. It shows the way toward a future for recorded music that’s more in continuity with music’s past. Recordings are cool and everything, but they encourage passivity. If I buy a recording, I can listen to it or dance to it, both fine activities, but what if I want to go further? What if I want to engage with it, converse with it, customize it or adapt it to my own needs? According to the law, I can’t. This flies in the face of the uncountable centuries of music practice that predate the invention of recordings. Before recordings, if you wanted to hear music, someone needed to play or sing it. To learn how to play or sing, you have to learn and interpret a ton of music by other people. The normal method for passing music along for nearly all of human history was by oral tradition, and a lot of adaptation and reinterpretation was an inevitable part of this transmission process.
In the modern world, most of the music you encounter is in recorded form. Adapting or customizing music is going to continue as it has for uncountable centuries. To adapt or customize a recording usually requires sampling. As it stands, the law is in the way. We need open-source music like we need open-source software.
Up with remixes and mashups
January 4th, 2010Couple of exciting memetic hybrids circulating around the web right now. First, here’s a techno track using samples of Pixar’s Up, which is one of the best and saddest movies ever. Thanks Mike for alerting me to the remix’s existence. Remixing songs is all well and good, but remixing movies, that’s where it’s at.
Read the rest of this entry »
Avatar is totally unoriginal but still pretty cool
December 28th, 2009I don’t get to movie theaters much. But as part of the new family plan to enjoy ourselves on Christmas, I went to see Avatar in 3D with a bunch of relatives. I went in intending to dislike it, and came out having thoroughly enjoyed myself. So much for my hipsterish snobbery.
What’s interesting to me is how the movie is simultaneously so fresh and so derivative. Avatar’s freshness is in its breathtaking visuals, all the technogeekery of its making. It’s derivative in its plot, setting, characters, and all other non-technical content. It’s practically a mashup in movie form. In the spirit of my blog post parsing out all the sources of Halo, I figured I’d do the same for this movie. Here are some of the most obvious sources, similarities and resonances (There are some spoilers within, but the plot of this movie is totally predictable and the least interesting thing about it, so feel free to read if you’re planning to go see it.) Read the rest of this entry »
You need a blog, not just a web site
December 16th, 2009Whenever somebody comes to me and wants a web site, this is what I tell them. Many of my friends who are internet professionals or general hipsters are already sneering at this and saying something like, “Blogging is so five minutes ago.” Maybe at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, that’s true. But I deal in my freelance and personal life with plenty of people who are resistant to blogs, Twitter and what have you, and it’s my job to help get these folks on board.
If you have a web presence of any kind for any reason, you need to be able to update it yourself, easily and frequently. Unless you know what HTML and FTP are, you can’t do that with a traditional site. However, you can easily learn to update your blog yourself, even if you’re a relative novice. You can do it from any computer in the world, and for the major blog platforms, you can even do it from a cell phone.