March 14th, 2010
I’ve had a lot of music teachers, formal and informal. The best one has been the computer. It mindlessly plays anything I tell it to, over and over. Hearing an idea played back on a continuous loop tells me quickly if it’s good or not. If the idea is bad, I immediately get annoyed, and if it’s good, I’ll cheerfully listen to it loop for hours. There’s something in the cumulative experience of a loop that makes it greater than the sum of the individual listens. Good loops create a meditative, trance-like state, like Buddhist mantras you can dance to. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s the right groove, there’s no such thing as too much repetition. Take “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.
At the end, they repeat “Naah, na na nanana naah, nanana naah, hey Jude” over and over for four minutes. I could listen to it for forty minutes. Why don’t I get bored? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: beatles, cold tech hot beats, country, dance, electronica, fela kuti, hip-hop, jazz, looping, memory, modules, recursion, rza, structure, symmetry, theodor adorno
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March 13th, 2010
Classical music recordings are usually straightforward snapshots of live performances. Sometimes recordings are spliced together from multiple takes or overdubbed, but this practice is considered by classical musicians to be highly shameful. Glenn Gould had a very different attitude toward the studio. He loved working there, and viewed it as a more valuable creative outlet than the concert stage. In the early sixties at age thirty-one he stopped performing live altogether to focus on recording and writing. He was outspokenly in favor of tape editing and other “artificial” studio techniques.
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Tags: audience participation, classical, cold tech hot beats, glenn gould, kanye west, mashups, recording, remixing
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March 10th, 2010
As part of our ongoing commitment to electronica-fy classic rock, may we present:
Born 2B Wylde
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Revival Revival vs Steppenwolf
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Vocals and arranging by Barbara. Samples, guitar and drum machine programming by me.
The song was written by Mars Bonfire. Best stage name ever! I love this song as music, but its symbolism is a little lost on me. Bla bla bla sixties, open road, freedom, whatever. The biker mythos doesn’t grab me. I’ve never made it all the way through Easy Rider. I do like the poster though.
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Tags: bikers, classic rock, drum machines, easy rider, guitar, herman hesse, hippies, remixes, revival revival, rock, sixties, steppenwolf
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March 3rd, 2010
My friend Adam suggested combining “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie and “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga. Here’s the result.
Let’s Just Dance
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Revival Revival vs Lady Gaga vs David Bowie
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Tags: dance, david bowie, eighties, electronica, fashion, lady gaga, mashups, nile rodgers, remixes, revival revival
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March 2nd, 2010
Following up and expanding on a post about learning music theory with Auto-tune.
So maybe you want to write a song or an instrumental in a particular mood or style, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the scales. Here’s a handy guide to the commonly used scales in western pop, rock, jazz, blues and so on. They’re shown in the way you’d program them into Auto-tune. Click each image to go to that scale’s Wikipedia page, where you can hear it, see it in traditional notation and pick up fun historical facts.
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Tags: autotune, cold tech hot beats, emotion, music theory, scales, visualization
Posted in music, software | 2 Comments »
February 26th, 2010
The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording.
I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.
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Tags: analog, audio, audio editing, autotune, cold tech hot beats, computers, electronica, hip-hop, improvisation, looping, mashups, music, pro tools, recording, remix, revival revival, sampling, sequencing, synths, tape, tape editing, visualization
Posted in hardware, music, software | 2 Comments »
February 21st, 2010
The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common ancestor, all human music has a shared origin in the calls of our primate forebears.
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Tags: cassettes, dna, evolution, family, genealogy, memes, midi, music theory, originality, sample maps, sampling, sequencing, songwriting
Posted in music, science | 4 Comments »
February 20th, 2010
Fan Wars: Copyright vs. Mash-ups and Fan Fiction
Many mash-up artists seem unaware that their work implicates any rights at all, and copyright owners may be reluctant to alienate fans with copyright restrictions. Artists such as Girl Talk remain outspoken against copyright restrictions on mash-up culture. Individual copyright owners, such as the owners of Star Wars, have adopted terms of use for mash-ups.
Is fan and other mash-up activity important to enrich our culture? Are existing allowances for fair use adequate? Should mash-up artists and fan fiction publishers have any right (legal or moral) to complain when others copy and redistribute their work? What is a copyright owner or licensee to do when it has contractual obligations to third parties in connection with their contributions? How should these issues be resolved?
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Tags: copyright, criminal justice, fan art, girl talk, mashups, star wars
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February 16th, 2010
Meet guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers, one of my favorite musicians in the world. He founded Chic along with the late bassist Bernard Edwards, and he’s on Twitter.
Nile Rodgers has led an action-packed life. As a teenager, he played with the Sesame Street band, and then with the Apollo Theater house band, where he backed such luminaries as Aretha Franklin and P-Funk. He was an active Black Panther. His Allmusic bio lists various NYC bands he played in before forming Chic, including a new wave rock outfit called Allah & The Knife Wielding Punks. He later went on to write most of the disco songs and eighties pop hits that I like, and helped lay the cornerstone of hip-hop. He deserves a blog post and then some.
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Tags: bass, bernard edwards, chic, dance, david bowie, disco, duran duran, eighties, funk, gremlins, guitar, hip-hop, madonna, nile rodgers, pop, sampling, sugarhill gang
Posted in music | 5 Comments »
February 11th, 2010
When I was younger I was obsessed with authenticity in music. I wouldn’t even play electric guitar because it felt too easy, like cheating somehow. I expended a lot of energy and attention trying to figure out what is and isn’t authentic. Now, at the age of 34, I’ve officially given up. I doubt there’s even such a thing as authenticity in music, at least not in America. There’s just stuff that I enjoy hearing, and stuff I don’t. But the concept of authenticity meant a lot to me for a long time, and it continues to mean a lot to many of the musicians and music fans I know. So what is it, and why do people care about it?
At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.
Sixties Motown
When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.
In the eighties my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: acoustic, alicia keys, authenticity, autotune, bebop, big chill, bill monroe, bluegrass, blues, cold tech hot beats, coltrane, electronica, emotion, harmonica, herbie hancock, howlin wolf, jay-z, jazz, judaica, klezmer, led zeppelin, lipsynching, michael jackson, motown, nyc, purists, rnb, sampling, soul, synths, thelonious monk
Posted in autobio, music | 7 Comments »
