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

To understand tuning, it helps to start with the concept of the octave. Two pitches are an octave apart if their frequencies have the ratio 2:1. Standard concert A has a frequency of 440 Hz. When you play concert A on the guitar, the string vibrates to and fro 440 times every second. If you double the frequency to 880 Hz, you get an A that’s one octave higher. If you halve the frequency to 220 Hz, you get an A that’s an octave lower. The ear hears all these different pitches as being the “same” note. (Technically, they’re the same pitch class.) This ability we have to hear frequencies related by powers of two as being the “same” is known in music theory terms as octave equivalency. This ability isn’t specific to humans. Rhesus monkeys hear octaves as being equivalent too.

Octaves emerge naturally out of the overtone series. The first harmonic of a vibrating string is an octave above the fundamental. The third harmonic is two octaves above. The seventh harmonic is three octaves above, and the fifteenth harmonic is four octaves above.

After the octave, the next musical interval you get from the natural overtone series is the fifth (it’s the third harmonic.) Two pitches are a fifth apart if the ratio between their frequencies is 3:2. The note a fifth above concert A (440 Hz) is E (660 Hz.)

Fifths are a very significant interval in western music theory. If you keep going up by fifths, you visit every note in the chromatic scale (every key on the piano) until you eventually wind up back on the note where you began. So if you start on A, then go up to E, then B, then F#, and so on, eventually you’ll wind up on the A seven octaves higher from where you started. This concept is known as the circle of fifths, though it would be more accurate to call it the spiral of fifths, since you’re getting higher and higher in pitch.

The circle of fifths is foundational to western music theory. It makes it possible to transpose music effortlessly from one key to another. The circle gives rise to all sorts of useful and interesting symmetries, too, like its close relationship to the circle of semitones.

But there’s a big problem with the circle of fifths. If you use the 3/2 ratio you get from the natural overtone series, the circle doesn’t actually close. Recall that to go up by a fifth, you multiply the frequency by 3/2. To keep going up by fifths, you keep multiplying by 3/2. To go all the way around the circle of fifths from A to A, you multiply by 3/2 twelve times:

(3/2)^12 = 129.746337890625

Going around the circle of fifths twelve times is the same as going up seven octaves. To go up an octave, you multiply by two, so to go up seven octaves, you multiply by two seven times:

 2^7 = 128

Going from A to A by fifths means multiplying the frequency by 129.746337890625, but going by octaves means multiplying by 128. The discrepancy between the two multiples is known in music theory terms as the Pythagorean comma, and it has caused musicians a lot of gray hair over the past few hundred years. It would be nice if a tuning system based on fifths agreed with a system based on octaves. It would make it a lot easier to hop from one key to another without having to retune your instruments. But that is sadly not possible.

The history of western tuning systems is the story of musicians trying to resolve the contradiction between the desire to have pure-sounding overtone-based intervals and a closed circle of fifths. European musicians of the 1700s tried all kinds of compromises. You could have some of the keys sound perfectly in tune, and have others be out of tune. You could have eleven decent-sounding keys and one awful one. You could use perfect fifths and smooth out the Pythagorean comma with out-of-tune thirds. You could have pianos with many extra keys for all the subtly different versions of each note.

I don’t advise getting too bogged down in the minutiae of all these different systems. The bottom line is that the western world eventually settled on its present consensus solution, which is to just make all the intervals other than octaves a little bit wrong. This system is called equal temperament. It’s considered a “modern” idea, but it dates back at least as far as Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei.

In equal temperament, all intervals are built by adding semitones together, and all semitones are defined as a ratio of one to the twelfth root of two. Twelve half steps gets you the perfect octave, because multiplying by the twelfth root of two twelve times equals two. An equal-tempered fifth is seven semitones –  you multiply the frequency by 2^(7/12). This comes to about 1.4983, which isn’t quite the 3/2 from the overtone system that your ear would like, but it’s close enough to not be offensively awful-sounding. The other equal-tempered intervals are similarly “wrong,” but by similarly bearable small amounts. Every key is identical and the circle of fifths closes, so everybody is more or less happy. If you get an electronic guitar tuner, it’ll be based on equal temperament.

Some musicians lament the loss of pure fifths. One bassist I know claims that all those out-of-tune fifths are gradually making western listeners crazy, which is why we’ve had so many enormous and horrible wars in the past couple of centuries. This idea sounds silly to me, but it’s true that pure fifths are easier on the brain. On instruments where the tuning is flexible, like winds and violin, the most skilled musicians tend to seek out pure intervals by ear, adjusting their intonation slightly depending on the key. Good singers do this too. Electronic instruments are a lot easier to retune than acoustic ones, and it’s sometimes possible to program in whatever tuning system suits you. Auto-tune lets you choose any historical or microtonal tuning system you want right off a menu.

So what if you’re just trying to get your guitar in tune? You need to make peace with not being able to do it perfectly. Use an electronic tuner to get the individual strings to their correct equal-tempered pitches and deal with the fifths sounding a little wrong, or tune with harmonics and have the low register not quite match the high register. In practice, most guitarists just fudge a little bit one way or the other, and guitars rarely stay tuned the way you want them to anyway. As always, let your ear be your guide.

There’s nothing going on in contemporary music that interests me more than the vibe of this track. The blend of electronic and tribal drums and Auto-tuned singing draws on the same sonic palette as “Love Lockdown,” which continues to be my favorite song of the 21st century, but “Lost In The World” is much bigger and denser.

Samples

The intro of “Lost In The World” is a long sample of Bon Iver’s “Woods.”

I don’t usually have a lot of patience for quavery-voiced indie folk, but I always enjoy an Auto-tuned a capella. Kanye was right to want to jump on it. “Woods” is a musical cousin of Imogen Heap’s “Hide And Seek” which I’m surprised that rappers haven’t taken more of an interest in sampling.

At this point there’s nothing too surprising about rapping over sampled singing, but I like this idea of layering tons of new sung vocals on top of samples. Aside from Bon Iver, the liner notes list Charlie Wilson, Kay Fox, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis singing or chanting. Their voices are layered and processed into an otherworldly thickness. It’s an arresting blend.

The album’s liner notes say that “Lost In The World” samples the famous beat from “Think” by Lyn Collins and the JBs — listen at 1:25. I can’t really hear it under all the other layers, but I’ll take Kanye’s word for it.

This song was most famously sampled in “It Takes Two” by DJ EZ Rock and Rob Base, but it appears in about nineteen thousand other tracks too.

The line “Who will survive in America” comes from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1.” I assume Kanye drew inspiration from the congas for his tribal drums too.

This has nothing to do with anything, but in the New Yorker profile of Mr. Scott-Heron I learned that he and I went to the same fancy private school. Small world.

The lyrics

When it comes to pop, the production usually outweighs the lyrics in substance by a hundred to one. “Lost In The World” is special, though, because through much of the song, different lyrics are being sung simultaneously. That’s some pretty hip stuff. Bon Iver’s sampled part goes:

I’m up in the woods
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a still
To slow down the time

When the rest of the vocalists enter, they sing:

I’m lost in the world
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a city
And I’m down for the night, down for the night

Says she’s down for the night

I’m never alone
Down the time

I’m lost in the world
I’m down my whole life
I’m new in the city
But I’m down for the night

Down for the night, down for the night

Then we come to Kanye’s actual verse, which, meh. It’s a mostly a string of simplistic cliches, though there is one pretty remarkable line:

You’re my stress and you’re my masseuse
Mama se, mama sa, mama coosa

First of all, very nice internal rhyme. Secondly, Michael Jackson fans will recognize the quote from the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which is itself a quote of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.”

What does it all mean?

In an essay in The Awl entitled “Understanding Kanye: Sweet, Sweet Robot Fantasy, Baby,” Mike Barthel describes Ye as turning himself (figuratively) into a robot.

Kanye had to fight to be taken seriously as a rapper, and he only succeeded once he started becoming a cyborg. A car accident in 2002 left him with a metal plate in his jaw, and instead of trying to cover up the unreal, he brought it to the fore, recording a song while and about how his jaw was still wired shut. The resulting single, “Through the Wire,” was his first hit, and the song that convinced Roc-A-Fella to give him an album deal. He had found beauty in a piece of machinery that would normally be hidden under a more believable imitation of the real. In so doing, he created a verbal analog of his most famous production technique, “Chipmunking,” in which a sample is sped up to match a faster beat and consequently raised in pitch as well. Chipmunking is a kind of joke about beatmaking; producers work to make a sample match their preferred tempo without changing pitch, but by exaggerating these seams, Kanye made the unnatural pleasing. He was learning the value of the mechanical in and of itself.

Anyone who traffics heavily in samples, as Kanye does, is going to confront the dissolving boundaries between “fake” manipulation of recordings and synths and “real” instruments and vocals. All hip-hop deals in that tension, and the best practitioners throw it in your face.

This influence of the mechanical floats in and out of his first two albums, though it fights with his natural tendencies toward the natural. You can hear the tension on “Slow Jamz,” a prime chipmunking track, when Kanye contrasts the unnatural speed and pitch of Luther Vandross with the biological abilities of Twista, someone able to imitate the hyperspeed feel of digital sound manipulation with natural verbal techniques.

When the other guest on “Slow Jamz,” Jamie Foxx, pops up on the second album’s “Gold Digger,” it’s to do the same convincing imitation of Ray Charles that he did in the movies. But after Foxx’s intro, we get the real Ray Charles, or maybe the “real” Ray Charles, since it’s a recording of a live performance that’s been cut up and rearranged. Foxx’s intro is a sort of signal to us that there’s more going on here than just sampling, but once you’re into the track, it’s easy to lose those issues given how closely the use of Charles’ “I Got a Woman” hews to rap conventions for sample use.

This idea of putting a real recording of fake Ray Charles up against a “fake” sample of real Ray Charles: very hip stuff.

It seems almost unkind to point this out, but between “Late Registration” and “Graduation” Kanye’s mother died after complications from plastic surgery. Technology had always served Kanye well before—in the form of his producer’s tools, it was the vehicle that took him from obscurity to the cusp of stardom—but now his mother’s own cybernetic changes had ended in death. The mechanical had turned on him.

The video for “Stronger” shows Kanye’s heart being surgically removed before he goes on an Akira rampage. Not too hard to figure out the emotional intent there. But the song is still a brag: “That that that that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.”

My friends are about evenly split on the album that follows, 808s And Heartbreak. I come down strongly in favor. The tension between organic and inorganic reaches a new pitch. On the one hand, there’s the pervasive Auto-tune and the clinical drum machines and synths. On the other hand, Kanye is liberated by the automated pitch correction to emotionally go for broke in his singing, knowing that anything he puts down will come out sounding musical. Mike Barthel shares my love for 808s And Heartbreak.

When he premiered his first track from the album, at the 2008 VMAs, the spot on his chest that was covered in bandages in the “Stronger” video was now filled. But instead of a real heart, he had a digital one, a pin made up of red LEDs blinking on and off, a crack running down the middle. The operation had been, at least on its own terms, a success. Kanye was now a full-fledged cyborg. On “Love Lockdown,” his voice was filtered through AutoTune with a sharp attack and a subtle bit of distortion to produce the sound of a human trapped, maybe unwillingly, inside a robot. The same effect was applied to almost all the vocals on the album, and while it was deliberately artificial, it was also, like he had said, stronger: where before he could only rap, now he could sing. The off-key caterwauling of “Drunk and Hot Girls” was now a precise tone full of a kind of electric soul. It wasn’t the raw emotion of humans, but the synthesis of emotional impulses and mechanical restraint, a computer’s inauthentic attempts at automatic expression which nevertheless sprung from a real human need to communicate.

And that brings us to the present. Kanye has all the money and fame and power a human being could ask for, but he’s still lost in the world. The alienation and self-doubt comes across loud and clear. But the power and confidence does too — all those singers, all those tribal drums, the angry defiance. This is a surprisingly challenging and avant-garde track for a supposed pop hip-hop album, a wall of sound spaced with yawning silences in pure digital black. If Kanye keeps putting out music like this, he can be as big a public nuisance as he wants.

If you’re a follower of internet memes, you know the story by now. If not: Antoine, his sister Kelly and her daughter were asleep in their apartment in the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama. An intruder broke in and sexually assaulted Kelly before Antoine chased him off. The family complained to the housing project authorities, who were unmoved. So on July 28, 2010, the Dodsons took their story to the local news. Here’s the clip:

The video became an instant YouTube sensation. Antoine is a charismatic guy, with a distinctive way of expressing his anger. Many people found him funny for his stereotypical ghetto mannerisms filtered through his flamboyant gayness. It’s a depressingly familiar story: the internet chooses someone to make the object of random large-scale ridicule, then gets bored and moves on.

But then, enter the Gregory Brothers, the prankster musicians behind the hilarious Auto-tune The News videos. The Gregorys have lately been Auto-tuning viral Youtube videos in addition to TV. As Michael Gregory observed, Antoine’s outburst had a strong melody to it. So it seemed like a natural move to do the “Bed Intruder Song.”

This track launched both Antoine and the Gregorys into the pop mainstream. It became YouTube’s most viewed video, with twenty million views as of this writing and no end in sight. The song has been climbing the iTunes charts and even cracked the Billboard top 100, the first web meme to do so. It would be a hugely significant pop artifact for that reason alone. But the fascination and horror of the song only begins there. It’s problematic in a way that the Double Rainbow song isn’t. You couldn’t ask for a more complex set of emotions than the ones that “Bed Intruder” inspires in me.

The case against

Everything about this story sets off my political alarms: a bunch of white Brooklyn hipsters do a parodic take on a horrific tragedy befalling a poor urban black family, using a music style appropriated from black urban culture. My liberal guilt kept me from even listening to the song for the first couple of weeks it was making the rounds. The worst part is at the end where Evan Gregory sings the song accompanying himself on piano in an exaggerated soul singer voice, radiating smug entitlement. That part makes me want to die of embarrassment.

The case for

Antoine Dodson himself told CBS news that while the attention bothered him initially, he now sees it more positively: “A blessing came out of a bad situation, a blessing in disguise.” He hired a lawyer, set up a web site and has been earnestly setting about professionalizing his fame. He seems fine with the song and has it set as his ringtone.

Brooklyn hipsters though they may be, the Gregorys seem like genuinely decent, well-intentioned people. I met Michael on the subway a few months ago, and in our brief conversation he came across as polite, nerdy, self-deprecating, basically like any of my friends. The Gregorys have been doing the right thing by Antoine, splitting all the proceeds from the song fifty-fifty with the Dodsons, and mostly behaving respectfully.

As a piece of music, the song works. It’s the strongest tune the Gregorys have produced so far. It has a great melody, a strong hook, and the emotions come across loud and clear. A friend and collaborator of mine, one of the most adventurous musicians I know, adores the song. I was surprised, because she herself has been the victim of sexual assault. The Dodsons’ situation is terrible, but Antoine is showing a fierce desire to protect his sister. His on-air rant is an expression of love and support. My friend finds the song to be uplifting, and apparently she’s not alone.

The Gregorys have become very adept at self-promotion using YouTube. One of their brightest innovations is to include lyrics and chords to make it easy for people to do remixes and covers, and the internet has responded. Here are the most interesting ones, starting with the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Marching Band:

Guy with violin:

Guy with shamisen:

DeStorm cover/parody, complete with costume:

I like the Gregorys and am glad they’re breaking through into the mainstream, troubling though I find the circumstances of their breakthrough. And I’m pulling for the Dodsons. Antoine has a web site that includes video of him answering questions from the fans.

Usually internet fame chews up its recipients and spits them out. I hope all this brings the Dodsons some happiness.

Revival Revival vs Primus

mp3 download, ipod format download

Vocals by Barbara Singer. Samples and programming by me. The guitar licks were originally played by Alex Torovic but have been chopped up pretty dramatically. This is part of our ongoing strategy, learned from hip-hop, of taking a familiar chorus and coming up with new verses.

“Tommy The Cat” is far and away my favorite Primus song. Les Claypool does the spoken intro and the choruses, but Tommy The Cat himself is voiced by Tom Waits. The song has a cool video, which I had never seen before the very moment of embedding it in this post, because it’s not like it got a lot of MTV spins back in the nineties. What did we do before Youtube?

I’m a funk, blues and jazz guy more than a metal guy. Among the metal virtuosos, Les Claypool is the funkiest. He says that when he auditioned to replace Cliff Burton in Metallica, he suggested they all jam on some Isley Brothers tunes. I’m sure that went over huge. Metallica wisely advised Les to go start his own band.

As with everybody we sample and remix, we hope Primus is cool with it, it’s purely a gesture of love. I imagine that they’d be okay, since they themselves have been known to do some sampling. “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver” uses a line from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (“Heh heh heh, dog will hunt!”)

My first reaction to Primus as a high schooler was mostly alarm. Growing up in New York City, you don’t get exposed to a lot of metal. If you’re a brooding white city kid looking to annoy your parents, you’re likelier to turn to hip-hop or punk (or both, this is why my high school classmates loved the Beastie Boys so much.) For most of my adolescence, I didn’t even realize that punk and metal are two different things. So I didn’t have a lot of context for Primus. I liked the spazzy energy but couldn’t handle the tightly coiled anger that seemed to underlie it. Was I ever so innocent? Having heard a lot of genuinely angry rock music since then, Primus sounds pretty harmless, and the comedy aspect comes across as more dominant. But of course, the best comedy comes from anger. It’s fitting that Primus did the theme song to South Park, they inhabit a similar emotional space.

Primus’ material isn’t exactly my cup of tea but I stand in awe of their musicianship. Most guys at their level of skill have no sense of humor whatsoever. I’d like to know how Les managed not to lose his sense of playfulness even after the tens of thousands of hours of disciplined practice it must have taken him to get that good at bass. I especially love hearing him play fretless, he gets so much microtonal excitement out of it. Ditto with Larry LaLonde – I can’t think of a more harmonically adventurous guitarist. Here’s to spazzy virtuosity.

For such a foundational element of America’s music, there’s a surprising amount of confusion as to what a blue note is exactly. So allow me to clear it up: a blue note to be a microtonal pitch in between a note from the blues scale and a neighboring note from the major scale.

Here’s a guide to the blue notes in the key of C.

• C major scale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B
• C blues scale: C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb
• C major plus C blues: C, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, A, Bb, B

There are three notes from the blues scale not found in the major scale, in bold above:

• Eb — the flat third
• F# — the sharp fourth
• Bb — the flat seventh

The flat third and seventh give the blues scale its tragic minor-key feeling. The very dissonant sharp fourth makes the blues unsettling and dark. Some people commonly refer to these non-major scale notes as blue notes. That’s not right — they’re blues scale notes that still fall on the piano keys. The blue notes fall between the piano keys, between each blues scale note and its closest major-scale neighbor.

In the key of C, there are blue notes between:

• D and Eb
• Eb and E
• F and F#
• F# and G
• A and Bb
• Bb and B

To play a blue note on guitar, like John Lee Hooker does, you bend the strings, making them go sharp.

If you’re playing slide guitar, you just move slightly above or below a given fret. On trumpet, sax or harmonica, you can bend the notes by overblowing. On a synth, you use the pitch bend control, like Herbie Hancock does in “Rockit.” At about 2:50 in he kicks off his solo with the blue note between the sharp fourth and fifth.

Herbie uses blue notes throughout his synth solo in “Chameleon” — listen around 5:00 – 5:30.

On trombone, fretless string instruments like violin, and the voice, pitch is continuous, so playing blue notes is as easy as playing “correct” piano key notes. You can’t play blue notes on the piano, but you can approximate them by playing adjacent keys simultaneously, for example F and F#.

The blues notes I listed are the most commonly used ones, but any microtone can find its way into the blues. Harmonica players sometimes use a slightly flattened C, D or A. Guitarists will bend any note so that it’s slightly sharp when playing very emotionally and emphatically.

The western tuning system is cool and versatile and full of intriguing symmetries, but it gets oppressive after a while. We’re taught that pitches from outside our system are “out of tune” or “wrong.” If you’re intending to play the standard pitches and you miss, that does usually sound bad. But when you play between the piano keys on purpose in musically logical places, microtones can be the most beautiful sound in the world. Blue notes enrich the western tuning system with glimpses of the infinite possibility of the underlying continuous pitch spectrum.

Other world cultures routinely use subdivisions of the octave much finer than the western half-step. Indian and Arabic scales use quarter tones. Klezmer clarinetists bend and stretch pitches like silly putty. Some avant-garde western western composers use their own idiosyncratic microtonal systems to write music that sounds like it’s playing on a warped records. That gets to be a little too much pitch freedom for my tastes. I prefer my microtones against a nice steady backdrop of western equal temperament, they jump out more that way.

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!

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.

At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.

Sixties Motown

When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.

In the eighties, my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. I can’t argue with the musical qualities of the Big Chill tracks. The singing is full of emotional truth-telling. That said, the arrangements sound cynical and commercial to my ears now. All those strings weren’t exactly sticking it sonically to the man. The slickness of Motown drove me to eventually seek out…

Delta blues

Raw, intense, minimalist, tied to a specific time and place: this is as good a definition of musical authenticity as you could ask for. The fact that it’s being made by oppressed people is even better. I embody the cliched story of the white hipster going back through the Stones and Zeppelin and hearing all the music they were inspired by/stole from.

The blues is a powerful and truth-telling musical form. But my desire to participate in it quickly became a problem. Blues might have been authentic for Howlin’ Wolf, but for me, it’s an awkward fit. It’s not for lack of trying; I play the best white blues harmonica of anyone I know. The phrasing and microtones and general attitude have shaped my approach to every other style of music I’ve attempted. But if I was going to tell my own truth in music, I needed to find something socially a little closer to home. Jerry Garcia helpfully steered me towards…

Bluegrass

As the fans like to say, bluegrass is sung from the heart through the nose. It has all the earmarks of regional authenticity, including an apparent lack of concern with finding a wide audience.

As with blues, I ran up against some immediate cultural tourism issues when I started exploring this music. It’s easy for a New Yorker like me to condescend unintentionally, treating bluegrass as “pure” because its practitioners are supposedly unsophisticated hicks, and therefore “unspoiled.” The true story is more complicated. The bluegrass guys might be rural, but they most assuredly are not dumb. Bill Monroe conceived bluegrass partially on a commercial basis, choosing repertoire and instruments that appealed to the audiences of his time and place. Also, bluegrass requires a lot of technical skill, especially for the lead instruments like banjo and fiddle. It’s not a good genre for the casual dabbler. Besides, by the time I dug into this music I was also starting to get interested in…

Monk and Coltrane

One way to define authenticity is through exclusivity. Bluegrass excludes casual dabblers with its technical demands. But bluegrass isn’t remotely as demanding as bebop. This is part of the reason why bebop is as untainted by commercial success as any snobby hipster could wish. Hard jazz is consistently the worst-selling genre in America, year in and year out.

Monk and Coltrane don’t fit into the bebop box exactly, even though they helped define its sound. They’re good avatars of purity because of the extreme individualism of their respective sounds. Any three-second sample of either of them is instantly recognizable. Monk isn’t as impenetrable as his reputation would suggest — several of his tunes have melodies a normal person could whistle. Coltrane wrote some nicely approachable tunes too, but he gets extra authenticity points for spending his last few years playing harshly avant-garde experimental music.

I’d recommend that any musician tackle bebop if they want a rigorous education in American music generally. It’s all in there: the blues, the showtunes, the highbrow and the lowbrow, all the chords and scales and rhythms and textures our culture has to offer, at least up until the advent of electronic music. But much as I love it, bebop never really felt like home to me. I’ll continue to study Monk and Trane and their cohorts, and will continue to enjoy and be inspired by them, but if I want to express my experience in the present reality, they don’t have all the answers I need.

Klezmer

Okay, so if urban black or rural white music is an awkward fit for a New York Jew, how about the music of the tribe? Klezmer is culturally close to home for me. It straddles the shtetl and the big city, the old country and the new one, ancient folk forms and American pop.

Klezmer sometimes gets called “Jewish jazz” but a better comparison is to country. There’s the oompah-derived boom-chick beat, the harmonic minimalism, the melodic improvisation, and the emphasis on rawness and feeling over technical complexity. The scales are different — you don’t get a lot of Ahava Raba scale in country. But the comparison is close otherwise. Discovering this music was a key puzzle piece for me; I use those Arabic scales any chance I get. Klezmer’s mutt-like fusion of disparate styles is a truer statement of myself than anything that could be described as pure. Unfortunately, klezmer isn’t a great way to connect with other people aside from other NYC hipsters with Jewish ancestry, so it was never going to be my ultimate destination. But I’m glad to have gotten acquainted.

The impenetrable avant-garde

You could define authenticity as an uncompromising commitment to inner truth, the desire to please others be damned. There’s something noble and admirable in this commitment. The problem is that the furthest reaches of inner space don’t usually produce music that other people can connect to. I never enjoyed extremely experimental music, but the academic world and critical establishment hold it in high regard. As an educated highbrow type, I felt like I had to dutifully subject myself to a lot of avant-garde experiments in an effort to purge myself of my weak-minded desire for music to be fun. I guess I learned a few things about the limits of human tolerance, but mostly I learned that I really do just want to have fun. Here’s a hilarious quote from “Can Machine-Made Music Sing Without a Composer?” in New York Magazine:

[O]n February 5, the Fireworks Ensemble will perform a live version of Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 album Metal Machine Music, at Miller Theatre. Listening to Reed’s original double LP is a test of endurance. In his garment-district loft, he leaned various electric guitars against their amps so that they howled at each other in crescendoing feedback loops, and welded the tracks into deafening industrial polyphony. The result was one of the most loathed records ever to hit the market. Nevertheless, the intrepid composer Ulrich Krieger decided to arrange it for traditional instruments, an undertaking that smacks of flagellant zeal.

I like the word “flagellant.” We just can’t shake our puritan roots, can we? There’s a lingering notion that painful music has the deepest purity. I’m grateful to have rid myself of this silly idea. Deliberately annoying music seems to me now to just be another form of class competition, its flamboyant uselessness a bigger statement of materialist affectation than any crassly commercial pop.

Fake is the new real

So where has the authenticity quest ultimately led me? As a kid I loved Michael Jackson and Run-DMC to pieces, but as I got a “music education,” I felt morally obligated to reject their music for their sinful use of drum machines, synthesizers and borrowing other people’s ideas. Most especially, I felt I had to reject them for their emphasis on pleasing people above all other musical concerns. Now pleasing people seems to me to be the only good reason to make music. If “fake” and accessible sounds like synths and drum machines put bodies on the dance floor, then fake is better than real.

I’ve had an instinctive attraction to electronic music dating back to loving science fiction sound effects and scores as a kid. But my peers and educators pressured me to be suspicious and hostile towards high-tech, pop-friendly musicians like Herbie Hancock. Herbie’s acoustic piano work is acceptable to the guardians of the jazz canon, but controversy continues to roil over his embrace of the synthesizer, sequencer and the sounds on the radio.

I’m glad to have withdrawn from the battle over purity. Not everything you hear in clubs or parties is terrific, but rejecting it wholesale was getting me nowhere. Giving myself permission to enjoy pop-jazz fusion, Herbie’s seventies and eighties future sounds, hip-hop and dance music has opened up huge new continents of sonic enjoyment to me. Authenticity is about truth-telling. For a high-tech city dweller, loop-based electronic sounds are more truthful to my experience than banjos and mandolins. I’ve whole-heartedly embraced the whole bag of technological tricks: Auto-Tune, lip-synching, whatever you’ve got.

Musical authenticity is in the emotional content, not the tools used to make it. Many musicians of my acquaintance fetishize vintage gear. There’s the hope that if you play the same harmonica as Little Walter Jacobs through the same mic and the same amp, maybe some of that Little Walter Jacobs magic will rub off on you. No doubt, quality gear sounds good in the right hands. But the hands are more important than the gear. Good tools can make it easier to realize an idea, and can even spark ideas. But a lame, unpracticed or anxious harmonica player will sound lame, unpracticed or anxious no matter what. And there’s nothing inherently soulful or un-soulful about any instrument. Drum machines only sound inauthentic when they emulate human drummers. Drum machines are perfectly authentic when used for their uniquely posthuman quality. It all depends on the musician. Like Herbie Hancock says, the machine doesn’t program itself.

As of this moment, my favorite song is “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

Is it authentic? Not really. It panders to me on many levels, as a hip-hop head, an R&B fan and a patriotic New Yorker. But Jay and Alicia pander so well, the beat is so tight, the chord progression and melody are so energizing, who cares?

The concern over purity is really about exclusivity. A mutt like me is is no position to be excluding anyone. But then, no one really is in a position to be excluding anyone. The shocking truth of biological evolution is that if you go back far enough, we’re all cousins with each other, and if you go back further, we’re cousins with bats, bananas, and bacteria. I believe strongly that the rules of evolution apply to music too. Our music all descends from the same monkey calls, so who’s in a position to be disputing the musical methods of anyone else? You don’t have to like everything, but disliking something is no reason to call its basic validity into question.

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.