Auto-tune was already a well-established studio tool by the time “Believe” came out, though it was unknown outside the music industry.
Also filed in Music, Recording
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Tagged autotune, cher, dance, electronica, Music, pop, posthuman, quora, Recording, Software
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The best remix/mashup tool that I’ve used is Ableton Live. For many years I used a combination of Recycle, Reason and Pro Tools, which was cumbersome and labor-intensive. Ableton handles the same tasks more easily and has a bunch of cool effects the other programs don’t.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
When you do a lot of computer-based music production and composition, you’re working as much with your eyes as you are with your ears. It’s only natural to start wondering about other music visualization systems. The representations in audio editors like Pro Tools and Ableton Live are purely informational, waveforms and grids and linear graphs. [...]
Also filed in Composition, Interfaces, Math, Music, Music Theory, Visual art
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Tagged bjork, euler, funky drummer, interfaces, linkedin, looping, melodyne, Music, music notation, networks, notation, reason, Recording, recycle, roger penrose, topology, visualization
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Thursday, October 6, 2011
Girl Talk doesn’t actually isolate sounds; it’s almost impossible to do that. You can use EQ to quiet background sounds to a limited extent, but there’s no way to perfectly isolate sounds from a mixed track. Girl Talk and other mashup artists rely heavily on a capellas (vocal-only mixes) and instrumentals, which are included with [...]
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Missy Elliot is one of the most futuristic electronic adventurers out there, especially in her collaborations with Timbaland. Yet her stuff is as hot and soulful as music gets. How does she do it?
Also filed in Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Tagged blondie, breakdancing, digging the crates, eighties, hip-hop, missy elliot, pro tools, run-dmc, Sampling, timbaland
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If anyone comes to me wanting a personal web site, I try to convince them they should have a blog, specifically, a WordPress blog. I’m doing several web sites for clients that use WordPress. The more I work with this platform, the more I come to love it. WordPress is free, hacker-friendly and supported by [...]
Also filed in Interfaces, Internet, Social Media, Writing
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Tagged blogging, blogs, cms, iphone, opensource, pr, themes, wordpress
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I wrote a general post about what makes a hot beat hot. As a followup, here’s how to program some generic patterns and a few famous breakbeats. The basic unit of dance music is a sequence of sixteen eighth notes, two measures of four-four time. Drum machines like the Roland TR-808 represent the sixteen eighth [...]
Also filed in Music, Music Teaching
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Tagged dance, drum machines, drumming, funky drummer, hip-hop, hone, honey drippers, james brown, led zeppelin, looping, programming, rhythm, rock, time
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I’ve now had a couple of opportunities to play around with an iPad, and to surreptitiously watch other people use it. I have strong and mixed feelings. The touchscreen interface is pretty wonderful and I have no doubt that it’s going to send the mouse the way of the floppy disk. But the walled garden [...]
This weekend my electronica band Revival Revival is doing some shows for the first time in many months. We’ll be doing a lot of what my non-electronic-musician friends consider to be cheating. The lead vocals and guitar will be live, as will some of the synths. Everything else will be canned, recordings played back from [...]
Also filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Music, Recording
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Tagged authenticity, electronica, guitar, Improvisation, lionel richie, michael jackson, midi, miles davis, pop, pro tools, reason, remixes, revival revival, songwriting
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Following up and expanding on a post about learning music theory with Auto-tune. See also a post about the major scale modes and an intro to minor keys. 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 [...]