Before “Believe,” Auto-tune was used for its intended purpose: to correct vocal performances in a natural-sounding, transparent way. Cher’s producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they turned the Retune Speed setting to zero, it produced the futuristic robot sound we’ve all come to know well. Since they were producing a high-tech dance track, they figured that the robot sound fit the mood, so they kept it in.

I doubt that Taylor and Rawling were the first people to discover the zero retune speed setting, but they were the first to use it on a mass-market commercial recording. To keep other people from imitating the sound, they told interviewers that they had achieved the effect with a vocoder. The music press repeated their story endlessly, so to this day there’s widespread confusion about the difference between vocoder and Auto-tune.

Original question on Quora

There’s no way to separate out the different tracks from a mixed song. If you want the vocals isolated, you need to get your hands on the acapella version of the song. DJ versions of pop and hip-hop singles often include the acapella and instrumental. Every so often a band will sell or give away “stems” — tracks with each instrument isolated. Stems also sometimes leak onto the web. Google is your friend here.

If you can’t get your hands on acapellas, instrumentals or stems, you can still do a lot of creative mashing up. Look for sections that are “in the clear,” where one instrument plays in isolation. Intros, endings and breakdown sections are good places to look for samples. I’m especially fond of laying a funky rhythm section break under a jazz or folk song, for example the breakdown of “1999″ by Prince under “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan.

As for how to learn: just do it, do it, do it. The web is loaded with useful tutorials. Find some other DJs and remixers and ask for tips, or collaborate. The beauty of the digital music world is that busting out tracks and sharing them for comments and criticism costs nothing but your time. Don’t be too precious about your ideas. Get your tracks finished and play them for other people as often you can. After you do a couple dozen, they’ll start sounding musical, and after a hundred you’ll have some stuff that you’re proud of. Most importantly: have fun.

Here my recent remixes and mashups, enjoy:

Original post on Quora

Music notation

Western music notation is a venerable method of visualizing music. It’s a very neat and compact system, unambiguous and digital, and not too difficult to learn. Programs like Sibelius can effortlessly translate notation to and from MIDI data, too.

But western notation has some limitations, especially for contemporary music. It doesn’t handle microtones well. It has limited ability to convey performative nuance — after a hundred years of jazz, there’s no good way to notate swing other than to just write the word “swing” at the top of the score. The key signature system works fine for major keys, but is less helpful for minor keys and modal music and is pretty much worthless for the blues.

Here’s a suggestion for how notation could improve in the future. It’s a visualization by Jon Snydal of John Coltrane’s solo in Miles Davis’ “All Blues”  (I edited it a little to be easier on the eyes.)

Snydal’s visualization is more analog than digital — it shows the exact nuances of Coltrane’s performance, with subtle shadings of pitch, timing and dynamics.

MIDI sequencers suggest further improvements over standard notation. Here’s a simplified electronic music sequencer called iNudge. Play, it’s fun:

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s tune “Four In One” as shown in standard MIDI “piano roll” view. The rectangles show not only which notes are being played and when, but exactly how long they’re held. Darker red means louder, paler pink means quieter. You can also read volume off the bars along the bottom.

MIDI is a versatile and user-friendly system. It can capture your keyboard performances, you can import scores, and you can even just draw notes onto the screen directly (my preferred method.)

The Music Animation Machine has a wonderful series of videos matching MIDI piano rolls of various classical pieces with recordings of them. Here’s Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

As software gets more sophisticated in its ability to extract pitch data from actual audio recordings, you can start manipulating them with the same ease as MIDI. Here’s a screencap of the pitch-correction program Melodyne, a close cousin of Auto-tune.

The lines show the actual sung pitches, and the orange blobs show the notes the program thinks the singer meant to hit. The blobs’ thickness shows volume. You can drag and drop the blobs and redraw the lines at will to alter the melody to your heart’s content. Melodyne even transcribes the performance to standard notation and MIDI for you.

High and low

We’ve made up our collective mind that faster frequencies should be spatially represented as being “higher,” and that slower ones should be spatially “lower.” It seems so reasonable, but really it’s totally arbitrary, and doesn’t even line up with physical experience. On the piano, the high notes are on the right and the low ones on the left. On the guitar, the “low” E string is physically located above the “high” one. The fingerings for higher and lower notes on wind instruments don’t correspond to a simple higher-lower axis either.

Absolute pitch is a straight line ladder, but pitch class is circular. The truest representation of pitch space is a helix.

Other ways to conceptualize pitch space

High and low aren’t the only metaphors we use for faster and slower vibrations. Like I said, pitch class is circular.

But the circle is really just replacing up/down with clockwise/counterclockwise. There are other ways to conceptualize pitch. We intuitively experience changing pitches as moving closer and further, or inwards and outwards. We also think of higher pitches as brighter and lower pitches as darker. Players of stringed instruments sometimes tune their upper strings a little bit too high on purpose, producing an effect known as brilliance.

Time

It’s a universal convention that notation shows time moving from left to right. But that’s not the only possible axis to use. How about forwards and backwards instead? That’s the paradigm in rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. The purest realization of this concept is in a game called FreQuency.

The game even allows you to construct your own remixes.

I like this tunnel metaphor and would like to see it extended into a full-blown production environment.

Waves

Pitches are sine-wave vibrations, and you can visualize them as such.

Sine waves wouldn’t make for very a helpful music notation, but they do help you understand what’s going on scientifically when you physically hear something. They’re even better animated:

See all of Wikipedia’s animated drum heads.

Waveforms

Audio editors show music as amplitude waveforms, blobs that get wider where the sound is louder. Here’s the Funky Drummer break in Recycle. The blue blobs show drum hits. These amplitude blobs don’t tell you much about the musical content except for timing and volume. But Recycle was meant for drum loops, where timing and volume are the only information you really need.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the Funky Drummer as it’s looping:

In a post on Design Observer, Rob Walker discusses the waveform as the new icon for music, replacing the stylized eighth notes or records that have done the job in the past. The SoundCloud player uses an attractive waveform graphic that helps the listener track where they are in the song by following the volume peaks. There’s even a SoundCloud group called Pretty Waveforms.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

The waveform has the potential to move from purely functional settings to more decorative ones. Here’s a waveform-based labeling concept by Joshua Distler, showing the tracks on Post by Björk.

Music theory and networks

I’ve always thought it would be cool to use networks to conceptualize music theory, and have made a few attempts at doing so. Here’s a comparison between the circle of half-steps and the circle of fifths, which are involutes of each other:

Here’s a map of the chord progressions in “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

And here’s a flowchart showing how you can figure out what scale or mode you’re hearing.

It would be way cooler to have more abstract three-dimensional interactive visualizations showing how chords, scales and melodies function. Leonhard Euler showed how you can represent tonal harmony as a lattice with the topology of a torus, as shown in this animation. Red lines show major thirds, green lines show minor thirds, and blue lines show fifths:

I have ambitions of my own in this area, but so far, I lack the programming skills to realize them. Others are taking some exciting strides, though. Dmitri Tymoczko made waves for getting the first music-related article published in Science about his topological visualization methods for tonal harmony. I can’t quite wrap my head around his ideas, but they’re intriguing.

Here’s an illustration by Aniruddh Patel from his paper, “Language, Music, Syntax And The Brain.” Again, I’m not totally clear what it all means, but I plan to investigate further.

Other theorists have attempted to use color to show harmonic function. Scriabin invented a “keyboard of lights” for that purpose, though it didn’t really catch on.

Visualizing musical form and structure

I like to use simple color-coding to keep track of which section is which while working on a song. Yellow is for intros and outtros, blue is for verses, green is for choruses and orange is for instrumentals and breakdowns.

Edward Tufte shows some more sophisticated song structure visualizations on his forum:

The Shape of Song project by Martin Wattenburg shows repetition within a piece of music. Here’s his visualization of “Like A Prayer” by Madonna.

Here’s Wattenburg’s visualization of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

Speculation

Here’s an entertaining video showing how you can create a happening drum machine sequence using counting in binary by Niklas Roy.

Wouldn’t this graph coloring system make a cool music notation or interface?

Visual Complexity has many more ideas like this one.

I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of useful and attractive schemes. Are there other cool visualization methods I should know about? Hit the comments.

Updates

John Clover hipped me to this post, which overlaps heavily: Amazing Music Visualizations and Teaching

I just had the chance to play with some of Björk‘s Biophilia song/apps. Some of them are groundbreaking interactive visualizations; some are just entertaining and groovy; some are baffling but deserve points for creativity. All the way around, it’s a remarkable experiment, one that I think is going to be influential.

See this post on Quora

Girl Talk uses comparatively primitive software for his mashups, so his process is labor-intensive. If you want to make life easier for yourself, get a hold of Ableton Live. Once you get a hang of the user interface, it’s a wonderfully versatile sampling and remixing tool. Before I got Ableton, I used a combination of various audio editors, Recycle and Reason, which worked well enough, but was a pain. Ableton is better.

Original question on Quora

My favorite Missy Elliot song out of many is “Work It.” Unfortunately, YouTube only has the clean version; it’s well worth seeking out the explicit version, which is unspeakably filthy but flows better and is much funnier.

This song came out eight years ago and it still feels like it fell out of the future. During the chorus, the part that sounds like gibberish is actually the lyric “I put my thang down, flip it, and reverse it” played backwards. There are more backwards lyrics in one of the verses — the line “Listen up close while I take you backwards” is followed by the reversed line “Watch the way Missy like to take it backwards.” There’s nothing new about backwards masking, but you don’t usually hear it as the hook of a pop-oriented dance track. Hip!

“Work It” uses three great samples. The beginning is from “Request Line” by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three. If you care about eighties fashion and dance at all, you must not miss this video.

The cowbell rhythm at the end is from Bob James’ recording of Paul Simon’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” as famously sampled in “Peter Piper” by Run-DMC.

Here’s a mashup of Bob James, Paul Simon, Run-DMC and Missy:

Peter Piper Mardi Gras Megamix by ethanhein

There’s also a synth percussion loop that runs throughout “Work It” sampled from the intro to “Heart Of Glass” by Blondie. Sorry, no embedding on this one.

This has nothing to do with the song, but it’s so awesome I can’t not share it: Missy’s turntable ring.

Like my other favorite hip-hop artists, Missy understands that the record player is the defining musical instrument of our time (along with its cousins the tape recorder, digital sampler and Pro Tools workstation.) There’s nothing intrinsically cold or alienating about electronic music production technology, if it’s in the right hands. Herbie Hancock once compared the synthesizer to an axe, that could be used to build a house or murder someone. Missy uses her axe to build awesome houses.

There are two different ways to make yourself a WordPress blog. There’s the more advanced method, which offers you full functionality, and the easy method, which is a little limited but is, like I said, easy.

The advanced method

You can download the software and set it up yourself, which is how my blog works. To do so, you need a web host, a place for your blog to live. People have generally good things to say about Bluehost. My business uses Apollo Hosting. I also know a lot of people and organizations that use GoDaddy, but I’m put off by their sleazy branding.

Once you have your hosting set up, getting WordPress installed requires a small amount of fairly scary technical business, best handled by a web geek like me. WordPress brags about having a five minute installation, and it’s true, but it can be a hairy five minutes if you’re a web novice. Some hosting companies make it easier by offering an automated installation system.

The easy way

If you want a gentler introduction, you can sign up for a free blog on wordpress.com. If you set up your blog there, all the behind-the-scenes admin is handled magically by the elves of WordPress’ parent company Automattic. Having a blog hosted on wordpress.com requires no web savvy and minimal fuss. The only downside is that blogs hosted by WordPress don’t give you access to the full range of plugins and other tools. A good option for novices is to start out with a WordPress.com hosted blog, and then as they develop more confidence, move into a full-blown self-hosted blog. Fortunately, it’s easy to export posts from one WP blog and import them into another one.

Reasons to love WordPress

Geeks like to make a distinction between free as in speech and free as in beer. WordPress is free as in speech and free as in beer. The basic code is open-source. You’re welcome to explore its innards, hacking to the fullest extent of your courage. If, like me, you know some HTML and CSS, you have complete control over how your blog looks. If you know PHP, Ajax and JavaScript, you can create your own plugins and custom add-ons. You’re free to give away or sell any of your additions to the WordPress ecosystem.

You might wonder why Automattic is so generous as to give away blog software and server space to host it. What’s in it for them? According to their web site, they make money from optional paid upgrades to wordpress.com blogs, consulting services, anti-spam technology, and affiliate deals.

WP’s open-sourceness can be a mixed blessing. The user interface doesn’t have the glossy polish of a Google or Apple product. But for me, the rough edges are a small price to pay. Google’s and Apple’s own blog products are excellent inadvertent advertisements for WordPress. They work fine as far as they go, but they’re severely limited in their feature sets and aren’t easily extensible. For example, in WordPress you can easily insert “Click here to read more” links into longer posts. Google’s Blogger system only lets you perform this useful function through an awkward and lengthy workaround.

The WordPress community is fiddling with the code day and night, adding new features and hunting down bugs. Users of Blogger are at the mercy of Google’s priorities, and right now it doesn’t seem like Blogger is very high on their list. Also, Google has been known to take down blogs for hosting copyrighted material like mp3s. I’ve never heard of Automattic taking a blog down for any reason.

WordPress in the wild

• Gawker Media.
• The New York Times blogs.
• Jay-Z’s official web site. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man.
• Smashing Magazine, a great web design resource.
• WordPress.com is itself a humungous multi-user WordPress blog. Recursive!

WordPress does have some time costs. The user experience can be a challenge. You sometimes get exposed to frightening strings of PHP. But the community has got your back. The ever-growing list of free plugins handles all kinds of advanced functionality that used to require heavy-duty coding. For instance, a simple plugin makes your blog renders attractively on iPhones and other mobile devices. Here’s how mine looks on the phone:

The less attractive side of the open-source coin is the official WordPress iPhone/iPad app. In theory, it’s pretty rad. You can write posts from the phone, edit and upload them, with a lot of the same functionality you get on the full web version. Unfortunately, the app is buggy and unreliable. It’s failed to save my work and has even eaten a few posts. I hope it receives some more developer attention. Being able to write posts while I wait for the train or stand in line at the grocery store is a miraculous thing. It makes me feel like I’m living in the future — when it works. I guess this aspect of the future hasn’t fully arrived yet.

Like all open-source entities, WordPress evolves quickly. It gets hacked easily and often, but it bounces back robustly. Last year a malicious virus broke every single link in my blog, incoming and internal. But a patch was released immediately and I had my site back to normal in a matter of minutes. It was a scary couple of minutes, but no harm befell me.

WordPress isn’t the best tool for every situation. If you’re a bigger company or organization, you might want a more robust content management system like Joomla or Drupal. A former employer of mine and my old high school both use Moodle, though no one at either of those institutions has much love for it. There are some commercial products that perform WordPress-like functions with a much more polished user experience. A nonprofit I’ve done some volunteer work for uses Squarespace, which is reasonably inexpensive and quite approachable.

Handy WordPress tips

The Lost In Translation blog has a handy setup guide for a new WP installation, including initial configuration tips and a list of recommended plugins. It makes a great preflight checklist.

Even if you plan to extensively hand-code a customized look for your WP site, starting with the right theme can save you a lot of effort. I use a modified version of the veryplaintxt theme, which replicates the look and feel of McSweeney’s. I like the serif fonts and lots of white space, but I made all the centered text left-aligned, since I don’t like hourglass-shaped text columns.

I have a bunch of nice WordPress themes bookmarked on Delicious. Happy designing!

Software like Reason and Fruityloops have drum machine emulators that follow the look and feel of the 808. The loop cycles from slot number one across to the right. When it gets to slot sixteen it jumps back to one.

Here’s how you’d count the basic loop. Above is the standard music notation method of counting two bars of four-four time. Below is the drum machine representation, with the eighth notes numbered one through sixteen.

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |

The key to the patterns below:

• bd = bass drum or kick drum
• sn = snare drum
• hh = closed hi-hat
• oh = open hi-hat
• rd = ride cymbal
• – is an empty slot

Genre boilerplate

Generic rock

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- bd -- -- -- bd -- bd -- bd -- -- -- bd -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- |

Generic hip-hop

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- -- -- -- bd -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- |

Generic techno/house/dance “four on the floor”

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| -- -- hh -- -- -- hh -- -- -- hh -- -- -- hh -- |

Some famous breakbeats

The Funky Drummer

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- bd -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- sn -- sn -- sn sn -- -- sn |
| hh hh hh hh hh hh hh -- hh hh hh hh hh -- hh hh |
| -- -- -- -- -- -- -- oh -- -- -- -- -- oh -- -- |

Impeach The President

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- -- -- -- bd bd -- -- -- -- -- bd -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| hh -- hh -- hh -- hh hh hh -- -- -- hh -- hh -- |
| -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- oh -- -- -- -- -- |

When The Levee Breaks

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd bd -- -- -- -- -- bd -- -- bd bd -- -- -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- |

Cold Sweat

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- -- -- -- -- bd -- bd -- -- -- -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- sn -- -- -- -- sn -- -- sn |
| rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- |

Notice that all these beats have a kick on the downbeat of the first measure. When P-Funk sings that everything is on the one, this is what they mean. Notice also that all of these beats have loud snare hits on beat three of each measure. This beat is called the backbeat, and it’s the defining sound of American dance music across every genre.

Hip-hop styles usually leave the kick drum off the downbeat of the second measure, slot 9 on the drum machine. Instead, hip-hop beatmakers anticipate the second downbeat by placing the kick in slot 7 or 8. Sometimes they delay it by putting it in slot 10 or 11. Sometimes they omit it altogether.

The odd-numbered beats are called strong beats, and the even-numbered ones are weak beats. Putting drum hits on the weak beats is called syncopation, and syncopation makes things sound hip. Experiment, and use your ears.

If you have requests for more breakbeat transcriptions, hit me in the comments. Happy programming!

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.

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.

Major scales

These scales have a major third, which makes them feel happy or bright. See them side-by-side.

C major

Happy; can be majestic or sentimental when slow. The white keys on the piano. Examples: “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

C mixolydian

Bluesy, rock; can also be exotic/modal. Play over C7 chord. Same pitches as F major. Example: “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles.

C lydian

Ethereal, dreamy, futuristic. Same pitches as G major. Example: “Possibly Maybe” by Björk (from the line “As much as I definitely enjoy solitude…”)

C ahava raba

Exotic, Middle Eastern, Jewish. Same pitches as F harmonic minor. Example: “Hava Nagila.”

Minor Scales

These scales have a flat third, which gives them a darker and more tragic feel. See them side-by-side.

C natural minor

Sentimental, tragic. Same pitches as E flat major.

C harmonic minor

Tragic, exotic, Middle Eastern.

C melodic minor

Mysterious, jazzy, very dark. Example: sixties Coltrane. See a blog post about melodic minor.

C dorian

Hip, sophisticated, jazzy. Same pitches as B flat major. Example: “So What” by Miles Davis.

C phrygian

Spanish/Flamenco. Same pitches as A flat major.

Synthetic Scales

These scales are based on regular, symmetric patterns. See them side-by-side.

C chromatic

All the piano keys. Freefalling, anxiety-producing. Same pitches as every other chromatic scale.

C whole tone

Dreamy, underwater. Every other key on the piano. Same pitches as D, E, F sharp, G sharp and A sharp whole tone scales. Example: Background parts in the Simpsons theme song.

C diminished

Dark, mysterious. Same pitches as E flat, G flat and A diminished scales. Examples: movies about Dracula.

Pentatonics and blues

Pentatonic scales have five notes. The blues scale is the minor pentatonic plus the flat fifth. See them side-by-side.

C major pentatonic

Joyful; widely used in world and folk music. Major scale with 4th and 7th removed. Same pitches as A minor pentatonic. Here’s a blog post about playing pentatonics on guitar.

C minor pentatonic

Rock; widely used in world and folk music. Minor scale with 2nd and 6th removed. Same pitches as E flat major pentatonic. Here’s a blog post about playing pentatonics on guitar.

C blues

Blues, obviously. Works great over major and minor chords. Minor pentatonic with flat fifth added.

Making chords

To make basic chords from the major and minor scales, start with the first note, then skip to the third, then the fifth. Using C Dorian, that’s C, Eb, G. This is called a triad, and it’s the simplest type of chord.

To extend the chords, add in the seventh, the second/ninth, the fourth/eleventh, and the sixth/thirteenth. Using C Dorian, that’s Bb, D, F, A. The more notes you add, the more complex and dense the chord becomes.

You can also skip or leave out notes: C, Eb, Bb, F for example. Also, you can double notes (especially the first/root.)

Don’t put fourths/elevenths into major chords unless you leave the third out, it sounds very dissonant.

Have fun!

Update: thanks to the enthusiastic users of Stumbleupon, this is by far the most-read post on this blog. Thanks for all the Stumbles, folks!