My friend Andrew, who was at the show, said this afterwards: “I can’t decide whether hearing the president say ‘This is not class warfare, it’s math’ or the fact that this band could become popular makes me feel more optimistic about the possibilities of life in America.”

Merrill Garbus started receiving rapturous praise from the indie-rock press a couple of years ago. I read her adulatory New Yorker profile and was immediately skeptical — in the abstract, the idea of a white indie rocker playing African music on a ukelele is not an enticing proposition for me. But curiosity got the better of me, and when I listened to some tracks, I was immediately hooked.

Stylistically, Tune-Yards is an unlikely combination of Fela Kuti, Medúlla-era Björk, Reggie Watts and Primus. Merrill Garbus uses pedals to sample and loop her voice and drumming, and plays baritone ukelele. Sometimes she strums it like a guitar, but she also plays fingerstyle in a way that evokes thumb piano. She’s accompanied by a bassist and two tenor sax players, all of whom also play assorted percussion instruments. See the band in action:

Here’s an actual music video:

Why does this music excite me so much?

The most obvious pleasure is Merrill G’s tremendous talent as a singer. Underneath all the growling and shrieking, she has a legit voice, with a big range and precise pitch control when she wants it. She’s an electrifying stage presence, too, with a relaxed intensity and unfakeable confidence.

Merrill G’s writing is interesting too, though not as consistent as her performance. Her tunes are quirky, thorny and dense. They have a lot of abrupt starts and stops, and show clear signs of being assembled solo in a bedroom on Garageband. Merrill G is masterful with the rhythmic and sonic aspects of English, with a dense syllabic flow that leans toward hip-hop. (She also sings a bit in Swahili.) Her melodies are chants or simple pentatonics, but still manage to show a lot of personal idiosyncrasy, like her penchant for starting and ending on scale degree two.

It’s always politically tricky when white musicians imitate black music. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a bad white rapper, for example. White musicians have a very mixed track record with African sounds. I’m totally in favor of David Byrne and Paul Simon, but Vampire Weekend is painful. Merrill G has so far been a lot closer to David Byrne. Rather than imitating the surface sounds of African music, she’s internalized it and used it to express the truth of her inner self. Some of the technique might be borrowed from Africa, but the content is all about modern America, and it feels truthful and authentic coming from her.

Live looping

The most significant aspect of Tune-Yards’ music is Merrill G’s use of live looping. Anyone who wants to make groove-oriented music in the present moment faces a dilemma. Live drummers tend to fall back into tiresome rock cliches, which get lamer with every passing year. On the other hand, sampled and programmed beats aren’t conducive to dynamic live performances. It’s hard to get that feeling of excitement from watching someone press the space bar on a laptop and then just… stand there.

Live looping gives Tune-Yards the best of both worlds. Merrill G records her drum patterns into the loop pedal right in front of you, one instrument at a time: floor tom, rim shots, snare, cymbals. She couldn’t use rock cliches if she wanted to, since she plays standing up and doesn’t use a kick drum. Because she doesn’t always nail her patterns exactly, her loops have an appealing human quality. And she mixes it up, so some tunes use only looped drums, some use both looped and live drums, and some are played entirely live.

Merrill G’s looped vocals are even fresher-sounding than the drums. Sometimes she uses them to do conventional backing vocals with herself. Sometimes the vocals act as a rhythmic element. Sometimes they build into hair-raising noise collage. Most songs use some combination of the above. By stopping and starting the loops in unexpected places, the tunes are spiced with attention-grabbing silences, a much better way to snap the room into focus than boring fills and crescendos.

If you couldn’t tell from reading this blog, I’m not too wild about rock and roll these days. I enjoy the classics, but I don’t think there’s much juice left in the orange anymore. I like Tune-Yards because they rock, incredibly hard, without falling back on tired rock tropes. I’d like to hear more music like that.

Some wishes

One of the high points of the show was when Merrill G had us all sing a long sustained note, the fifth of the key, through a section of one song. There’s room for way more audience participation than that in the Tune-Yards experience. I’d love to see Merrill sample the crowd clapping a simple pattern, or chanting, and then build on top. Audience participation is one of the main things missing from most concerts, and when you do it right, it’s magical. It’s one of the great sicknesses of our society that we leave music-making to specialists, while most people just passively observe. Tune-Yards could create some truly ecstatic group music-making, without having to get all kumbaya about it.

I also wouldn’t mind hearing Tune-Yards slip a cover or two into the mix. Original material is all well and good, but it would have been really satisfying to hear the set close with a radical take on a classic eighties pop tune. Anna suggested “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, which I think would be perfect — imagine Merrill G shrieking the lyrics over a raucous drum loop. Or how about some Michael Jackson? “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” would fit their style like a glove. Pop covers would be another way to bring in some more audience participation, since Merrill G’s knotty original stuff doesn’t facilitate much singing along.

My own preferred form of audience participation is the remix, so here’s a mashup of Tune-Yards’ “Bizness” with “Nobody Beats The Biz” by Biz Markie, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” by Kanye West and Jay-Z, “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” by Billie Holiday, “Taking Care Of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive and “Strictly Business” by EPMD. Enjoy.

Bizness megamix by ethanhein

Update: really good article discusses Merrill Garbus’ complex gender politics. Recommended.

I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful whole. The best way to get an idea of what I’m talking about is just to see the man in action.

Reggie on Conan:

“Wax and Wane,” a video by Jake Lodwick:

See a video deconstructing the process behind songs like this. The delay/looping unit is a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler.

A ballad, Big Ass Purse:

A longer performance at Google:

Reggie’s most produced video blends his usual disjointed lunacy with a loving parody of hip-hop. It’s called F*ck Sh*t Stack, and obviously, the language is very explicit. And hilarious.

Reggie works well in purely audio form too: Thus Far (Alternate) by reggiewatts

Reggie on Radiolab:

Hear many more tracks on this Spotify playlist. I’m particularly awestruck by the fifteen-minute “My History Thus Far.” It’s a wonderful autobiography unto itself, but if you want more background, check out this New York Magazine profile.

Improvised words and electronic music belong together

Barbara Singer and I had a somewhat similar idea to do completely improvised electronic music, and to combine it with improvisational comedy. Reggie’s method is better. First of all, instead of using canned beats like we did, he beatboxes everything himself. Secondly, he sticks to a pretty strict hip-hop/R&B song form: eight and sixteen bar sections, intros, verses, choruses, breakdown, outtro. The structure gives his improvisation a solid skeleton, keeping the music tightly enjoyable while the words go off in whatever random directions.

I went through my free jazz phase, but Reggie’s approach is way cooler than free jazz. Reggie is accessible and pleasurable in a way that free jazz only very rarely is. Relatedly, I like improv comedy as much as the next guy, but combining it with singing and rapping pushes it onto a completely different level. Reggie feels less like an entertainer and more like a transmitter for the collective unconscious of the culture. In a prehistoric culture he probably would have been a shaman or a prophet. It helps that he looks the part.

Studies of musicians who improvise while having their brains scanned show a connection between melodic improvisation and speech.

[Improvising] led to a surge in activity in a variety of brain areas, including parts of the premotor cortex and, most intriguingly, the inferior frontal gyrus. The premotor activity is simply an echo of execution — the novel musical patterns, after all, must still be translated by the fingers. The inferior frontal gyrus, however, has primarily been investigated for its role in language — it includes Broca’s area, which is essential for the production of speech. Why, then, is it so active when people create music on the piano? The scientists argue that expert musicians create new melodies by relying on the same mental muscles used to create a sentence; every note is another word.

Given these results, it’s not surprising to me that the richest improvisation combines music and language. The best jazz solos have a speech-like aspect. Freestyle hip-hop makes the speech-music connection literal, but suppresses melody. By combining hip-hop with melodic singing and discursive lectures, Reggie is hitting every brain region at once. When we laugh at his routines, it’s not because his stuff is “funny” in the traditional sense (though it can be.) I think we’re laughing at the delightful surprise of having so many new connections between our own brain regions being lit up at once.

So, the show we saw

Apparently it was taped for a Comedy Central special, that’s something to look forward to. As you can see in the videos, there’s a whole dance component to Reggie’s act, which includes waving his fro around hypnotically. It had been pouring buckets before the set started and it was still humid, so Reggie’s hair steamed visibly under the lights.

The beauty of the live looping is how unpredictable and context-sensitive it is. Sometimes crowd noise got recorded along with whatever Reggie was singing or beatboxing, adding to the texture. On one of the songs involving piano, he overdubbed two layers that were slightly out of sync with each other. Instead of erasing one and trying again, he just let it run, giving the piece a nice organic lopsidedness.

While most of the content came straight from Reggie’s subconscious, there was some pop culture too. He did a flawless parody of Radiohead. He shouted out nerd culture several times too, making references to rolling for initiative and Seven Of Nine. He aimed a surprisingly earnest lecture to computer hackers, entreating them to find something constructive to do.

Reggie’s best material went from the ridiculous to the sublime. He started one of his hip-hop tunes by shouting out all the boroughs – “Is Brooklyn in the house? Is Queens in the house?” That led to a rapped discourse on New York City, its neighborhoods, the way the streets down in the financial district and the Village are all oddly laid out because it was before the grid system, then the Dutch, the native Americans, the wooly mammoths, the formation of the earth, and all the way back to the big bang, which he described as “a black hole emitting radiation.” Which: wow.

In general, Reggie’s act feels like he’s explaining to aliens how humans work. I sometimes feel like that’s my job with this blog. It’s a thing with people who grow up between different cultures. In my case, it’s the conflict between my Jewish and Protestant ancestors. Reggie’s case is more complex, because he has a French mother and an African-American father. His Obama-like chameleon quality is the result of an Obama-like upbringing. He probably feels like an alien himself most of the time — too black for white people, too white for black people, too European for America, too American for Europe, too musical for straight pop, too pop for the academy. He and I share a fondness for Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” which is all about the alien perspective on humans. I bet he likes Björk’s “Human Behaviour” too.

The crowd was heavy on the hipsters, but more varied in race and class and age than you’d think. The people around me were uniformly enraptured, laughing at the random nonsequiturs, bopping to the songs. The only exception was a woman standing front and center at the foot of the stage, who abruptly stormed out two thirds of the way through the set, angrily exclaiming, “This is not funny!”

Below is a diagram showing a computer that can add one plus one to get two. It’s made out of an XOR gate and an AND gate, each of which is a relatively simple bunch of transistors wired together in particular ways. Transistors are just on-off switches that can be flipped electrically, so they have no moving parts (except electrons.) The beauty part is that the output wire of one transistor can be used to flip another transistor on and off.

The “numbers” in the diagram are just voltages: “zero” is zero volts, and “one” is (I think) 2.5 volts. The numbers in a computer are encoded in binary (base two) because it’s the most convenient way to physically realize them — voltage that’s pretty close to zero can be read as zero, and a voltage that’s pretty close to 2.5 can be read as one.
This simple adder has two input wires and two output wires. The input wires each represent a single binary digit, and the output wires together represent two binary digits. If one input wire has a voltage and the other doesn’t, the equivalent of adding one plus zero, the adder returns no voltage in the “twos” digit and a voltage on the “ones” digit. If there’s a voltage on both input wires, the equivalent of adding one plus one, the adder returns a voltage on the “twos” digit and no voltage on the “ones” digit, the binary number 10, or as we know it in decimal notation, 2.

Here’s a diagram of a four-bit adder, capable of adding numbers as big as sixteen. The diagram shows how adding seven (0111) plus twelve (1100) to get nineteen (10011) would work.
Wire together enough adders and other basic logic devices, set up at the right initial voltages, and you’ve got yourself a computer.

Original post on Quora

Miles and Eno seem radical, but in a way, they’re just boiling the usual compositional process down to its raw essentials. Really, all composition and songwriting consist of improvising within constraints and then sequencing the best ideas into shape. Usually this improvisation happens in short spurts, inside the composer’s head or alone at an instrument. Using a recording device instead of a sheet of paper can make the process more bodily and immediate, and can help get at playful ideas that might not squeak past the mind’s internal judges and editors during the relatively slow process of writing stuff on paper. Michael Jackson wrote his best stuff by improvising into a tape recorder. There’s something about improvising a performance while being recorded that focuses the mind wonderfully.

Since 2004 I’ve been writing and recording with Barbara Singer in different configurations. The first version was her idea, a band called Blopop. She had some techno versions of pop songs programmed into her MC-909 groovebox, and the idea was that she’d sing and DJ, and I’d improvise guitar on top.

Both Barbara and I come from jazz training, and both of us felt boxed in playing standards. Free jazz wasn’t that interesting to us either; it felt too chaotic and self-indulgent, too disconnected from the musical world we live in. Babsy had the bright idea to use electronic beats and loops as the basis for improvising. Her original concept was to use pop songs as the basis for improv. We did a little performing that way, but then quickly moved into completely open-ended blowing over beats.

Brian Eno has all kinds of different systems for imposing order on his in-studio improvising. For us the system was to use the presets in Barbara’s groovebox. The generic techno grooves programmed into the box establish  a key and a vibe, so you just set the tempo and you’re off to the races. In a perfect world we would have programmed everything ourselves from scratch, but there was something wonderfully effortless and expedient about just dialing through the presets at random.

Babsy is an improv comedian, a veteran of various improv groups and a student of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We talked a lot about the improv comedy bible Truth In Comedy and how applicable it is to music too. If you’re confident, responsive to the other performers, and genuinely focused on the present moment, you really can’t do anything wrong.

Constrained improvisation is a perfect meditation exercise. I learned firsthand what the Buddhists always say, that it takes a lot of practice and discipline to be maximally effortless and intuitive. I’ve enjoyed few activities more than freeform musical improv over techno beats. Completely free improv can be a pleasure too, but it can also be a pain, since it usually devolves into formless noodling. The beats give enough structure to make the process fun. Here are some of our attempts to put the Truth In Comedy principle into action.

See

mp3 download, ipod format download

Improvisation recorded during the first time Barbara and I were ever in a room together, in the summer of 2004. Babsy is in the excellent habit of recording pretty much every note she plays or sings. I was a little taken aback when she wanted to record our first session, but went along. This isn’t edited, or even mixed. I pick a starting note at random, which turns out to be the flat seventh of the synth loop’s key. That establishes the main riff I have to work off of. This element of harmonic randomness ended up being a big part of the band’s pleasure for me, having to puzzle out a good-sounding relationship between the note I picked to start on with whatever came out of the groove box.

Warmup

mp3 download, ipod format download

Another unedited improv, recorded a month later than the one above. As the title suggests, this was just to get limbered up at the beginning of a session. It fades out once I lose the thread.

Everything We Do Is Right

mp3 download, ipod format download

Maybe our best attempt at a longer-form improv.

Window remix

mp3 download, ipod format download

Edited from over half an hour down to eight or so minutes. The original contains all these ideas, but they’re separated by some stretches of aimless wandering, and with looser repetition. I like it better this way.

Listening now, this stuff doesn’t nearly as tight or focused as our more pop and remix-oriented material we eventually moved into. But I admire the spirit of adventure behind it. My guitar playing certainly improved enormously under the pressure of all that recorded improvising. We never remotely found an audience for this music. It was too weird and avant-garde for the dance music people, not weird enough for the avant-garde, too unfocused and unpredictable for pop fans, too electronic for jazz fans. Still, I think it was a cool idea, one that I don’t think we came close to exploring completely. I’m still interested in pursuing this format further. Anybody out there game for some Eno-flavored freeform techno? Drop me a line.

A little background. I got my first Mac exposure in 1988, eighth grade, back in the days of System 6 and Pagemaker 1.0. It was love at first use. The mouse interface is old hat now but then it was a tremendous improvement on typing arcane DOS commands.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a blue and white G3 tower.

This computer was an amazing piece of industrial design. The side panel was a big hinged door so you could effortlessly open the computer up and access its innards. Not like I needed access to the guts all that often, but it was nice to not need a screwdriver or anything when I did. I also really loved having big sturdy handles on all four corners. It seems like such a no-brainer now, I wish all heavy, delicate and expensive objects had big handles on them. One of my roommates at the time said I shouldn’t buy this computer because, while it looked cool, it would be instantly dated – so late nineties. She was right, but I think the time-period specificity is part of the coolness, like the fins on a 1957 Chevy.

I resisted the iPhone for a long time because of the price and the lousy AT&T phone service. My mom generously bought me one for my last birthday, though, which was especially fortuitous, since a few weeks later, my laptop’s motherboard died. The iPhone turns out to be such an awesome computer in its own right that while I haven’t been able to replace my laptop, I’ve been getting along quite well without it.

The iPhone isn’t a perfect computer. The lack of multitasking is annoying (though this is supposedly about to change.) It would be nice to have access to the file system without having to go through the rigmarole of jailbreaking. But these complaints feel trivial given how fundamentally miraculous the iPhone is. It feels like it fell out of the future, and it hasn’t been far from my hand since I got it. And I appreciate the move away from the tired desktop metaphor.

So. The iPad.

On the one hand, you have fanboys like Steven Fry proclaiming the pad to be the second coming. On the other hand, there’s the well-documented Reality Distortion Field that makes people think they like Apple’s stuff more than they actually do. I fall in between. The most reasonable review I’ve come across is the one from Daring Fireball. After a glowing review of the user experience of Apple’s iWork office apps, there’s this caveat:

There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing.

Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep.

What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.

The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac:

1. Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad.
2. Open the file on my Mac and make changes.
3. Save.
4. Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB.
5. Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad.
6. Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app.
7. Sync.

Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’ “My Documents”.

And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertently make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document.

 

This sounds like a colossal drag and it’s reason enough for me not to be interested in buying an iPad. I don’t mind the klutziness of iTunes syncing on the iPhone, since I’m not doing a lot of serious document creation on it anyway. But on a full-sized computer, I’d expect to be able to do real work on it, not just watch movies and read magazines. I’d like to be able to easily print, too.

I use the computer for routine web browsing and entertainment like everyone else. But I work on it too, and what I love most about it is how it enables experimentation, mental adventure, self-expression. At its best, Apple knows how to encourage experiential learning and creativity. The last couple of Macs I bought came free with OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, both of which I love to distraction. They inspired my sample maps and the macro-scale structure of my book in progress, respectively. I’ll bet the iPad version of OmniGraffle is a major delight… until it’s time to move your files to another computer, or print them, or do anything else with them.

I’m also disturbed by the iPad’s lack of USB ports. I can imagine a lot of awesome uses for the iPad in music, but if I can’t connect my gear to it except through a proprietary port that may or may not be supported by the makers of my other stuff, what good is it? There are plenty of intriguing music apps on the iPad, like Smule’s delightful Magic Piano. But if I make something cool with one of these apps, how do I get it out of the iPad? How do I make mp3s and put them on my web site, or export audio to Pro Tools, or do anything else with it?

Apple’s supposed concern with user experience only extends to a point. Right now, just about every video and most of the animation on the internet uses Flash. For reasons of corporate strategy, Apple has decided to not support Flash on the iPhone or iPad. So a huge percentage of web sites are missing their multimedia content, and instead show a picture of a mysterious blue lego block. I know the back story behind this functionality failure and can work around it, but most people will just find it mystifying. I don’t like Flash any more than Steve Jobs does, and I’d welcome a future without it. I guess I can understand the decision not to support it, but I’m mystified as to why Apple wouldn’t offer any onscreen explanation as to what’s going on.

Both the iPhone and the iPad are missing the most significant piece of interface friendliness that I can think of: an easy and obvious way to undo your last action. Novice users need undo even more than I do. The iPad’s Undo command is buried in the secondary onscreen keyboard and it’s totally absent on the iPhone. There’s a weird and not widely known feature of both phone and pad where you can undo by shaking the device. I rarely remember this exists and I can’t imagine how, like, my mom would ever think to do this gesture. Where’s the big red physical undo button? Come to think of it, why doesn’t every computer have one?

Apple’s handholding can be helpful, but when it interferes, it’s as annoying as Microsoft’s animated paperclip. Like, on the iPhone the automated typing correction changes “its” to “it’s” in every circumstance, whether it’s correct or not. There’s no way to create exceptions to the rules and I finally had to turn the autocorrect off entirely.

Finally, I’m concerned byApple’s less-than-stellar environmental record. I’d wish for them to get to work on that.

So. No iPad for me yet. But Apple is full of surprises, and I’m keeping an open mind.

From left to right, you’re seeing an Mbox, the audio interface that goes with Pro Tools. We plug the vocal mic into it so that the computer can perform its magic, like Auto-tune and compression. Next is a little mixer sitting on top of a headphone amp. Then there’s Babsy’s laptop running one of our Pro Tools files, showing some of the backing vocals she’ll be singing over. On the right is a Line 6 Pod, a guitar effects unit and amp modeler. It’s a lot easier to carry to gigs than a real amp. Using a fake amp modeler isn’t very rock and roll but it fits perfectly with the spirit of electronica. For the show we’re going to use two computers, Barbara’s to run Pro Tools, and mine for Reason synths and playback of ordinary audio files.

Using canned tracks causes me some residual philosophical angst. It lacks the risk-taking that jazz-trained cats like me associate with a good live performance. But sonically, accompanying ourselves with stuff we prerecorded and sequenced is a no-brainer. We want the tracks to sound a certain way. Doing our synth and sample-based sounds completely live would be either difficult or impossible. So our show is taking on the aspect of a highly skilled karaoke experience. This runs directly against the spirit of rock, jazz, country and most of the other music I’m trained in. But it fits in well with the music I’ve become most interested in lately, hip-hop, contemporary R&B and electronica. All of these styles use recordings in live performance heavily.

I’ve had a few different bands with Barbara at this point. We started out doing live techno remixes of pop and rock songs, mostly using preprogrammed beats. Then we entered our free improv period, combining a groovebox and live instrumentation to do a more electronic version of seventies Miles Davis. Now we’re back to pop, using very tightly structured songs with meticulous arrangements. We still use loose improvisation as a way to write during the recording process, but the finished product gets heavily edited, and most of the improv winds up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. I love improvising without a net in front of an audience, but the supply and demand equation for that kind of music isn’t too favorable. That’s as it should be. Unstructured jamming is more fun for the performers than the listeners, and our focus now is on making sure the audience has a good time. If you’re in NYC this Saturday night, come on down! We promise it’ll be fun on wheels.

Infrared Roses is a better idea in concept than execution. Freeform electronic improv is a great idea in the right hands, but sadly by this point in their career the Dead were just fooling idly around. Still, Infrared Roses has some moments of sonic intrigue, and I’ve pulled a few interesting samples out of the noodly morass. It inspired me to do some freeform electronica improvising of my own, though I preferred to do it over four-on-the-floor dance beats.

While the Dead didn’t do anything too musically exciting with their gadgets, just the fact of them was eye-opening for me. It was fun to hear Jerry play synth flute and such via MIDI guitar. His playing was a lot more adventurous back in the sixties by feeding back his regular old guitar Hendrix-style, but the MIDI sound had its own charm. Real guitar nerds will enjoy this exhaustive rundown of every guitar Jerry ever performed or recorded with.

The Dead’s actual music didn’t sound much like the hip-hop and electronica I mostly prefer now. But there were some formal similarities. One of my favorite aspects of DJ music is the seamless transitioning between songs. At their best, the Dead performed some nice transitions of their own, some planned, some spontaneous. These transitions became integral to the Dead’s repertoire, which came to revolve around suites like Scarlet Begonias -> Fire On The Mountain. The most exciting transitions were the spontaneous ones, as songs dissolved into a freeform jam that coalesced unexpectedly into new songs. My favorite of these is from 9/27/72 at the Stanley Theater, when they segued smoothly from Dark Star into Cumberland Blues.

The Dead were pioneers of PA system technology, especially with their epic Wall of Sound. Their system was more conventional by the time I went to see them, but it was still pretty slick. Because they used wireless in-ear monitors and foot switch controls for the vocal mics, there wasn’t any extraneous sound bleeding into the stage mics. The PA broadcast noise-canceling frequencies, the way fancy Bose headphones do. All the way around, the sound at Dead shows was crystal-clear, even in giant echoing stadiums, without extreme loudness. It was a huge disappointment to go hear other bands with lesser systems in the same venues. Like, after seeing the Dead at Giants Stadium a few times, I saw U2 there and it was like having a bucket over my head. Techno-hippies for the win.

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.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.

Ms Heap is accompanying herself with artificial harmonies created by a Digitech Vocalist Workstation. The device reads her pitch in the manner of Auto-tune. She tells it what notes to shift her voice to using the MIDI keyboard. She also uses some digital delay for the echo effect, and towards the end, she samples herself singing the chorus so she can sing the last verse over the playback.

The result is one of the most futuristic sounds I’ve ever heard, and yet it’s also warm and intimate, not icily posthuman like you’d expect from such a high-tech performance. Because the harmony responds on the fly to her singing and keybs playing, she’s free to improvise, phrase and embellish in the moment. Real live choral harmony is cool and everything, but if you want multiple complex parts, you need to write everything out ahead of time, and conduct the singers exactly. It doesn’t leave much room for spontaneity, and spontaneity is key to truth-telling in music. When I say that “fake” technology can result in more real music, this is exactly what I mean. Here’s how Imogen Heap describes the writing of this song in an interview with Electronic Musician:

My favorite computer blew up on me, but I didn’t want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play ten notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It’s quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that’s a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn’t feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I’m not questioning that one at all.

Brian Eno says that for synths to have the soul of traditional instruments, they need to be a little bit unpredictable. All the glossy perfection the computer makes possible can get to be oppressive. You get the best results when you don’t have total control, when there’s room for the happy accident. By confusing the harmony algorithms, you can get unexpected notes that sound way more hip than anything you could have worked out on paper ahead of time. It’s why I’m so addicted to Auto-tune. If you set it right, it reacts in surprising ways, live as it’s happening, opening up new avenues of expression.

Some people think that artificial harmonizers and Auto-tune are dishonest, that they’re cheating, that they’re part of a larger trend towards fakery that’s destroying western civilization as we know it. We have an abiding anxiety about the authenticity of our music. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “authentic” descends from ancient Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal.” This word in turn descends from authentes, “one acting on one’s own authority,” a composite of autos, “self,” and hentes, “doer, being.” The related word “genuine” descends from the Latin genuinus meaning “native, natural,” from the root of gignere, “to beget.” The thinking goes that the word originally referred to paternity.

I think it’s reasonable to be concerned with the parentage of our music, but it’s wrong to be repulsed by the bastardized and the mongrel. All the really exciting music is hybridized. Hip-hop combines the phrasing and improvisation of jazz with European electronic beats. Jazz combines African-American traditions with European harmonies and song structures. Let’s have some mongrel pride! The president of the United States is a self-described mutt. So am I. Purity is lame.

By the way, gorgeously recorded a capellas are irresistable to samplers, so it’s no big surprise that someone would take an interest in using Imogen Heap samples. The best example I could find is Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say.” It won’t change your life or anything, but I give him props for venturing it. I feel less of an urge to sample Imogen Heap and more of an urge to get my hands on a Vocalist Workstation and try out some harmonies of my own.

Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

The stats on my blog are a writerly gold mine. Anybody who clicks on one of my posts is voting for the ideas in that post. I tend to put stuff up when it’s about two thirds of the way done. Posts that get a lot of hits and comments get more attention and revision from me. My readers decide collectively what gets more attention, what gets polished up into presentable prose and what gets left as free form public note-taking. The really hot ones, about the Funky Drummer or Delicious or Auto-tune The News, are smooth and polished like the rocks in a particularly lively river.

No surprise: the internet loves Michael Jackson and Lil Wayne. Surprises: the internet loves math. Especially dividing by zero. The internet also loves quantum mechanics and its broad overlaps with musical harmonics.

Even better than the stats are the commenters. Moderating my comments is one of the most fun aspects of blogging. I get to be the editor of my own private little Atlantic Monthly. Asking for comments has been a good way for me to crowdsource research, mobilizing my smart friends and any internet stranger who happens along to gather unexpected new data.

I don’t approve all of my comments. Any blog attracts a lot of automated spam comments, some of which slip past the filter. Fortunately, spam is easily spotted. As for hate mail, I don’t get very much. Usually people who disagree with me just stop reading and move on. Long, thoughtful disagreement is even more rare. When someone does disagree with me at length, I take it as a token of respect and am happy to post and respond. This guy’s comment was an opportunity for me to practice my grownup debating skills, learning to disagree agreeably. This is a growth area for me, and the blog has been good for practicing.

Blogging from the iPhone has turned out to be an unexpected treat. I would have expected the phone to be a severely limited blogging tool compared to the full screen and keyboard. For editing HTML, the phone is not the right tool for the job, but it’s perfectly fine for writing prose. Editing and moderating from the WordPress iPhone app is still cumbersome, but the fact that it even exists and they give it away free is a near miracle. I wrote most of this post while waiting in lines. Who needs a Game Boy?