I made a new track for teaching swing

I just finished my Groove Theories book proposal and sent it out, that was about twenty years of very slow work followed by two weeks of very fast work. So fingers crossed on that. I included two sample chapters, one on blues tonality, and one on swing. For the swing chapter, I wanted to find examples of the same piece of music played with and without swing for ease of comparison. In class, I usually play “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite and “Sugar Rum Cherry” by Duke Ellington. This isn’t an exact comparison, though, because Ellington does more than change the time feel; he also changes the instrumentation and structure. I wanted to find an example where the same music repeated identically with and without swing. The problem is that so far as I can tell, no such piece of music exists. But then I realized that it would be easy to make this piece of music myself, by warping something out in Ableton Live and applying different groove settings.

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Building the Funky Drummer beat

I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use complex syncopated rhythms that are hard for beginners. Meanwhile, the music in beginner-level method books is rhythmically bland and unfunky. What do we do?

Heather takes a creative approach to arranging for her school bands. For each part, she creates two versions: a simplified one and an advanced one, which she places side by side in the score. Students can start out playing the simplified versions, and when they are ready to challenge themselves with the “real” music, they can just jump seamlessly over. This enables Heather to accommodate players at different levels in the same ensemble. I like this idea, and it made me think we should do something similar for groove pedagogy. My thought was this: for each groove, create a series of simplified versions, moving in incremental steps from basic quarter notes to the full syncopated complexity of the actual music. The real challenge is that we want each version of the groove to be musically satisfying, so even if you can’t handle the pure uncut funk yet, you can at least play something that sounds good.

In this post, I test the method out on the Funky Drummer break. The video below shows an Ableton Live session I made that moves from an extremely simplified  quarter note version through incrementally more advanced rhythms every four bars.

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A nice thing happened with my music theory songs

A Twitter acquaintance wrote me this series of DMs:

Screenshot of Twitter DM: "I'm trying to learn theory and basic keyboard skills (to justify my purchase of a synth) and I've been searching and searching for EXACTLY the resource inside the Music Theory Songs album on Bandcamp. 'It would be cool if as I walked around with headphones on I could...hear...the chords in context' I thought to myself many times. 'That would help me learn.' And of course HERE's GOOD OLD ETHAN HEIN having created a really solid pedagogic resource accessible in the form of music, right there in Bandcamp. Thank you!"

I am so glad he had that reaction. I haven’t been pushing my music theory songs too hard because I wasn’t sure about their value to anyone other than me. I did use some of them in my New School music theory class last semester, but I was hesitant about using the whole thing. This message was a helpful indication that I’m onto something and should lean into it. 

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Warp factor

In this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature of musical time itself.

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Dilla Time in “Chameleon”

After reading and re-reading Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time, now I’m listening to music with new attention to rhythmic subtleties. I have especially been digging into the relationship between J Dilla and Herbie Hancock–Dilla sampled Herbie on “Get Dis Money” and “Zen Guitar.” That digging made me go back to my favorite Herbie tune with fresh ears.

This might be the funkiest thing in the history of funk. But what makes it so funky? I wanted to investigate the microtiming of that incredible opening groove to find out.

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Music Theory Songs

Ashanti Mills from my Patreon had a brilliant idea. He said, hey, you know how you combined interviews with Toni Blackman with hip-hop songs to explain hip-hop pedagogy? You should do that with music theory: have songs that explain their musical content to you. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious as soon as I hear it, but it took Ashanti suggesting it to make me realize that. So: here is my first batch!

The whole thing came together very quickly. In some cases, I took teaching materials I already developed in Noteflight, exported the MIDI, dropped it into Ableton, added beats, and went from there. In other cases, the idea existed in my head and just needed some a little trial and error to realize it.

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Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed

It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:

But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:

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