Manu Dibango released “Soul Makossa” in 1972. He wrote it as the B-side to “Mouvement Ewondo,” a praise song for the Cameroonian football team on the occasion of the 1972 Tropics Cup. Language Log explains the chant-like lyrics:

The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

Duala is spoken in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, which has long been a musical hotbed. Since the 1960s, Cameroonian pop music has been dominated by a rhythmic style of dance music from Douala known as makossa. The Duala word makossa is often glossed as “(I) dance” (as in this article by Cameroonian linguist George Echu). The entry for makossa in the Oxford English Dictionary further explains that makossa is “derivative of kosa ‘to peel or remove the skin of (a fruit or vegetable)’; the name refers to the twisting and shaking movements of the dancer.”

Language Log quotes this excerpt of Dibango’s autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee:

On one side of the 45 I recorded the hymn [praise song]; on the other I recorded “Soul Makossa,” written using a traditional makossa rhythm with a little soul thrown in. In my Douala neighborhood, at my parents’ house, I rehearsed this second piece. The house had no air-conditioning, and the windows were wide open. All the kids flocked around. Hearing me rehearse, they fell over laughing. Unbelievable — how on earth had I concocted that mishmash? Poor makossa really took a blow. My father was astonished: “Can’t you pronounce ‘makossa’ like everyone else? You stutter: ‘mamako mamasa.’ You think they’re going to accept that in Yaoundé?” The Cup organizing committee reacted the same way. The march on side one they found “impeccable.” But the other side… “Really, Manu has gone nuts. What possesses him to stutter like that?”

The New York DJ and party promoter David Mancuso got his hands on “Soul Makossa” and played it incessantly at his loft parties. The song became an underground hit, especially when it started getting airplay on WBLS. The few copies floating around New York were quickly snapped up by other DJs. Several bands rushed out their own covers to fill the gap, most notably Baba Olatunji and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. Their versions are fun, but nowhere near as funky as the original. Finally, Atlantic Records released Manu Dibango’s version on one of their sub-labels, and it went so far as to crack the top 40 in 1973.

Soul Makossa quotes, samples and remixes

Quoting “Soul Makossa” became something of a trope in the early eighties, ranging from subtle references to the beat or bassline or horn line to full-blown quotation. My favorite example is by Nairobi featuring the Awesome Foursome.

This song just screams 1982, especially with those 808 cowbells. This song was itself sampled in many other songs, including Schoolly D’s “Mama Feel Good.”

Kool Moe Dee’s “Pump Your Fist” draws on “Soul Makossa” for percussion, the wah guitar stab and part of the main sax riff.

A more recent example: “Latinhead” by Dirty Beatniks.

Soul Makossa has also been sampled by Jay-Z, Geto Boys, Poor Righteous Teachers and A Tribe Called Quest, among many others. See a full list of samples.

Michael Jackson and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

By far the most famous musical descendant of “Soul Makossa” is Michael Jackson’s first single from Thriller, the best song on that album and a strong contender for the best song of the eighties, period.

I was at a hippie-ish wedding this past summer. People were having a good time, but not really dancing. Then “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” came up on the iPod and the party suddenly jumped off. Little kids, old folks, everyone in between, people were getting down. Say what you want about Michael Jackson as a human being, but there’s no denying the power of this song. It never fails to get people shaking their butts, across all ages, races, classes and cultural backgrounds.

The copyright-minded among you might well ask: did MJ steal the Makossa chant? Manu Dibango certainly thought so, and sued MJ, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement. The issue isn’t a cut-and-dried one for me, though. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two chants:

The most obvious difference is in the syllables, but there are musical differences too. Manu Dibango’s chant is a two-bar phrase sung/chanted entirely on the note G, over an unchanging G7 chord. Michael Jackson’s chant is a four-bar phrase with a call and response structure. He adds a two-note melody harmonized in thirds and a chord progression alternating between D/E and E7. MJ also uses a little more syncopation. I’d say that MJ’s chant is more of an adaptation than a direct theft.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” quotes, samples and remixes

Pop and hip-hop musicians quote MJ’s version of the Makossa chant incessantly. Some high-profile examples:

• “No Clause 28” by Boy George
• “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith
• “Cowboys” by the Fugees
• “Brooklyn Girls” by Charles Hamilton
• “Lost In The World” by Kanye West

People love to shout out the chant during live performances, too, everyone from Zap Mama to Jamie Foxx. Rihanna goes further than quoting MJ’s chant; she builds an entire dance track around a reharmonized sample of it. MJ’s song is in the key of E, but Rihanna’s producers put it in the key of F# minor. This is hip stuff; the same notes in MJ’s sunny and uplifting coda become melancholy in Rihanna’s track.

People quote other parts of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” too. Big Daddy Kane quotes the “Yeah yeah” part in “Warm It Up Kane,” listen at 1:32.

Other tracks quoting this phrase include “Vibin’ (The New Flava Remix)” by Boyz II Men and Busta Rhymes featuring Treach, Craig Mack and Method Man, and “Feels So Good” by Mase.

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz adapt big swaths of MJ’s song in “Startin’ Something.”

Björk has to be different, of course, so she (mis)quotes the opening line of MJ’s song in live versions of “I Go Humble.” And by the way, her MJ fandom was apparently reciprocal, if this radio show transcript is to be believed.

Visualizing the Makossa diaspora

Here’s a complete map of the genealogy of the Makossa chant; click to enlarge.

Putting it all together

Here’s a mashup I made combining several of the tracks mentioned above so you can get your makossa on.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Any noteworthy sightings of the Makossa meme that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Hat tip to Mike Devlin for coining the phrase “Makossa diaspora.”

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

Here’s how to program the scale into Auto-tune. And here’s a new composition of mine using two melodic minor scales, C and G.

Melodic Minor

mp3 download

Melodic minor looks innocent enough on paper. It’s just the major scale with a flat third. Here’s the A melodic minor scale:

A  B  C  D  E  F# G#

The chords and scales you get from melodic minor are exceptionally dark and peculiar. The tonic chord is Am(maj7), sometimes called the major-minor chord:

A  C  E  G#

You can hear this chord in the first four bars 0f “Chelsea Bridge” by Billy Strayhorn:

The weirdness of melodic minor comes from the way it lives simultaneously in the minor and major key worlds. There’s a constant conflict between the bottom half of the scale and the top.

A B C D E -- sounds minor

E F# G# A -- sounds major

Melodic minor also has more internal dissonance than the major scale and its modes. Major scale has a tritone between its fourth and seventh notes. Melodic minor has two tritones, between the third and sixth, and between the fourth and seventh. In A melodic minor, the tritones are between C and F#, and between D and G#.

Playing melodic minor on guitar

Unfortunately, melodic minor is extremely annoying to play on guitar. All of the fingerings require pinkie stretches and/or position shifts. The only way to make it easier is to not use all six strings. Here’s the most accessible fingering for A melodic minor I can think of.

A quick Google search will reveal many more fingerings. All of them are hard. But hey, grappling with them will really help you learn the fretboard.

Melodic minor modes

Just like the major scale, melodic minor has modes, new scales you get by starting and ending on notes other than the root. All of these scales are just as weird as their parent, with daunting technical names to match. Two of these scales in particular are invaluable for jazz and other harmonically adventurous music.

Lydian dominant

The fourth mode of melodic minor is like lydian with a flat (dominant) seventh. Alternatively, you can think of it as being like mixolydian with a raised fourth.

D  E  F# G# A  B  C

This scale sounds awesome on dominant 7th chords. It also has a special relationship to fundamental physics. Lydian dominant is sometimes called the acoustic scale because its constituent pitches are close to the ones arising from the natural overtone series.

Eastern European folk music uses a lot of lydian dominant. Modern jazz and the artsier forms of rock and metal are fond of it too. Björk uses it on her terrifying song “Pluto.”

Altered scale

The other crucial melodic minor mode is the seventh one. I learned it as the altered scale, and I’ve also seen it less helpfully called the super locrian or diminished whole-tone scale. Altered scale is a crucial part of the vocabulary of jazz from the fifties onwards, especially for the more intellectual players like John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. Here’s the G# altered scale, the seventh mode of A melodic minor:

G# A  B  C  D  E  F#

Altered scale is a tough one to remember. A good mnemonic is to take the major scale and raise the root a half step. To get G# altered, just take the G major scale and raise the root to G#.

The chord that you get from the G# altered scale is G#7 with a flat fifth (D), sharp fifth (E), flat ninth (A) and sharp ninth (B.) The full chord symbol would be:

G#7(b5 #5 b9 #9)

That’s a godawful thing to see on a score. Because the chord is G#7 with all the possible alterations to its fifth and ninth, it’s easier to just write:

G#7alt

So say you’re in C# or C# minor and you hit the V chord, G#7. The conventional scale to play would be G# mixolydian for a major feel, and C# harmonic minor for a minor feel. Coltrane might use one of those, but he’d be just as likely to play G# altered, for either major or minor.

Gil Evans makes heavy use of altered scale in the arrangement of Porgy And Bess he did with Miles Davis. Listen at 0:19.

It’s not on YouTube, but be sure to also check out the track “Gone,” which is based around this same altered scale lick, but with an uptempo feel and awesome drumming by Philly Joe Jones. The lick also appears in “There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon For New York.” Really the whole Porgy and Bess album is worth a spin.

Tritone substitution and melodic minor modes

In jazz you frequently encounter the ii-V-I chord progression. Here it is in the key of C:

Dm7  G7  Cmaj7

This is a nice sound, but it’s bland. Starting in the bebop era, jazz musicians adopted the practice of replacing V chords with the dominant chord whose root is a tritone away. So in the progression above, you’d replace G7 with Db7. This makes the bassline satisfyingly chromatic:

Dm7  Db7 Cmaj7

The tritone substitution isn’t as music-theoretically crazy as it sounds. The active ingredient in G7 is the tritone between the third B and the seventh F. The active ingredient in Db7 is the tritone between the third F and the seventh B. Because they have their defining tritone in common, G7 and Db7 are functionally the “same” chord.

Here’s where the real fun begins. The maximally hip voicing of G7 in this context is G7alt. The scale that goes with G7alt is the G altered scale, the seventh mode of Ab melodic minor:

G  Ab  Bb  B  Db  Eb  F

For the tritone sub, you want to use Db7(#11). The scale that fits this chord is Db lydian dominant, the fourth mode of Ab melodic minor:

Db  Eb  F  G  Ab  Bb  B

G altered and Db lydian dominant are the same scale, just starting on different notes. The same Ab melodic minor scale sounds equally awesome over each chord. Try it!

To understand modes, picture a set of Scrabble tiles. Say you have seven Scrabble tiles that spell the word RESPECT. You can take the first two letters off and stick them on the end to get SPECTRE (the British spelling of specter.) In music theory terms, SPECTRE is a mode of RESPECT; conversely, RESPECT is a mode of SPECTRE.

Now imagine your Scrabble tiles spell ABCDEFG. If you treat the letters as note names, this is a scale called A natural minor. If you take the first two letters off and put them on the end, you get CDEFGAB, the C major scale. C major and A natural minor are modes of one another; learning to play one gives you the other one for free.

This post will walk you through all of the modes of C major. To find a mode, pick any red note on the diagram below and read clockwise to get the mode starting on that note.

Each mode goes with a chord, so I’ve listed those too, along with real-world examples.

C to C – Ionian mode

Ionian mode is just the regular old major scale. You only see the Greek name used in music theory textbooks.

Scale: C D E F G A B
Chord: C E G B D F A -- Cmaj7

Examples include everything from “Jingle Bells” to the William Tell Overture. See my major scale post for more.

D to D – Dorian mode

Same as the D natural minor scale, but with a natural sixth. Dorian is fabulously useful for jazz and funk.

Scale: D E F G A B C
Chord: D F A C E G B -- Dm7

“So What” by Miles Davis uses Dorian all the way through, in D on the main part and in Eb on the bridge.

The ninth, eleventh and thirteenth in D dorian are E, G and B. These notes form an E minor triad. If you play E minor and then D minor, you get the distinctive “So What” riff.

Other examples of tunes in Dorian, from Wikipedia:

• “Greensleeves”
• “Born to Be Wild“
• “Scarborough Fair”
• “Eleanor Rigby”

E to E – Phrygian mode

This mode has a distinctive flamenco vibe. It’s the same notes as E natural minor with a flat second.

Scale: E F G A B C D
Chord: E G B D F A C -- Em7(b13)

Outside of flamenco, Phrygian doesn’t get much action, but Samuel Barber uses it in his Adagio for Strings. Rightly so — with its flatted second, third, sixth and seventh, it’s pretty much the saddest of all scales.

F to F – Lydian mode

This beautiful, somewhat otherworldly scale is the F major scale with a sharp fourth.

Scale: F G A B C D E
Chord: F A C E G B D -- Fmaj7 (#11)

Lydian is great for dream and fantasy sequences. Björk uses it for “Possibly Maybe,” starting on the line “Much as I definitely enjoy solitude.”

G to G – Mixolydian mode

The same as the G major scale, but with a flat seventh.

Scale: G A B C D E F
Chord: G B D F A C E -- G7

Mixolydian is one of the defining sounds of blues and rock. Examples:

• Just about every blues tune
• “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Day Tripper,” the “Nah nah nah nah” section of “Hey Jude” and many other songs by the Beatles
• “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Björk again! “Big Time Sensuality”

A to A – Aeolian mode

This mode is better known as A natural minor — Aeolian is another one of those Greek names no one really uses.

Scale: A B C D E F G
Chord: A C E G B D F -- Am7

Natural minor is the basis of the whole minor-key universe and is a blog post unto itself. Use it whenever you need tragedy. Example: “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Joaquín Rodrigo (as played here by Miles Davis.)

B to B – Locrian mode

A very dark, strange scale. Like B natural minor with a flat second and fifth.

Scale: B C D E F G A
Chord: B D F A C E G -- Bm7(b5)

The flat second and fifth make Locrian very unstable, and I can’t think of any tunes based entirely on it. The main thing you need Locrian for is a minor-key chord progression that you see all the time in jazz:

Bm7(b5)  E7      Am
ii       V       i

Over Bm7(b5), you play B locrian (or A natural minor, however you prefer to think of it.) Over E7, you usually play A harmonic minor. Over Am, you can play any A minor scale of your choice.

One of my favorite jazz tunes is “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson, which is mostly made up of minor ii-V-i in various keys. Here’s the awesome Dizzy Gillespie big band arrangement:

Learning the modes

The best way to learn any music theory concept is in the context of actual music. “So What” teaches you Dorian mode better than any teacher can. That said, a good teacher can help you connect the various scales to specific pieces of music. Ideally, you should be studying songs that you already know and like.

Music theory takes a lot of memorizing, but it doesn’t need to be tedious. Even if you’re just systematically running the scales up and down, put a good drum machine beat on and try to get them to sound like music. If you’re in New York City, contact me and I’ll be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.

You might also enjoy a more general post about scales and emotions.

How to form the scale

Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve slots, one for each note in the western tuning system, labeled like so:

C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B

To make the C major scale, you just remove all the ice cubes with # in their names, like so:

C [ ] D [ ] E F [ ] G [ ] A [ ] B

Here’s a graphic representation of the C major scale. Scale tones are in red, the notes you skip are gray.The scale is extremely easy to play on the piano: just play the white keys from C to C.

Here’s the C major scale in standard music notation. The curvy lines show notes with a skip between them, and the angled ones show notes that are adjacent on the piano:

Here’s how you’d program the C major scale into Auto-tune, which clearly visualizes the notes you leave out:

Where did the naming convention come from?

Given that C major is “home base” in the western tonal system, it’s weird that it starts on C and not A. Why this departure from the alphabet? I have no idea. I put this question up on Quora; maybe someone there will have some insight.

Also, what’s up with all the sharps and flats? Why not just use the first twelve letters of the alphabet for the twelve pitches? Maybe it’s just too many things to remember – we don’t do well trying to hold more than eight or nine distinct pieces of information in short-term memory. The sharps and flats system is annoying but it does reflect the fact that you can form other scales by starting with C major and raising or lowering (sharping or flatting) certain pitches.

Some music theory geekery

You can play the C major scale by going around the circle of fifths from F to B:

F  C  G  D  A  E  B

Try playing the scale this way, it’s fun.

The notes you leave out of the C major scale form the G flat major and E flat minor pentatonic scales. Try playing only on the black keys on the piano to hear these scales.

Harmonizing the scale

When you play certain notes from the major scale simultaneously, you get a lot of interesting chords. The pattern that generates the most commonly used chords in C major is very simple. You can form a C major chord by starting on C and playing every other note in the scale:

C  E  G  B etc...

You can form chords from any note in the scale the same way. Just pick one and go up the scale, skipping every other note. When you do this for all seven notes in C major, you get a group of seven chords that sound really good together.

C:    C  E  G (I)
Dm:   D  F  A (ii)
Em:   E  G  B (iii)
F:    F  A  C (IV)
G:    G  B  D (V)
Am:   A  C  E (vi)
Bdim: B  D  F (vii)

These seven chords are called the diatonic chords to C major. (The name comes from Greek.) The diatonic chords are good to know. You can play them in any order and any combination, and the C major scale sounds terrific over all of them.

The roman numerals next to each chord refer to the scale degree the chord is based on. G is the V chord in C major because G is the fifth note in the C major scale. These numbers can be a good shorthand. You’ll see references to chord progressions like I-IV-V, which means, in C, play C, F, G. Another common progression is I-vi-ii-V — that’s C, Am, Dm, G.

The first note in each chord is called the root. The next one is the third (makes sense, you skipped the second.) After that is the fifth. If you add another note to each one, you get seventh chords.

Cmaj7: C E G B
Dm7:   D F A C
Em7:   E G B D
Fmaj7: F A C E
G7:    G B D F
Am7:   A C E G
Bm7b5: B D F A

Adding still another note to each chord makes more complex-sounding ninth chords. Adding yet another note makes eleventh chords, and yet another makes thirteenth chords. After the thirteenth, you’re back on the root again.

A very common rock and pop songwriting technique is to use all of the diatonic chords except for the I chord. By combining Dm, Em, F, G7 and Am, you can get a dark, moody and ambiguous sound that’s still tied together by the familiar major scale. You get enough angst to have an edge, without scaring away mainstream audiences.

Playing C major on the guitar

Major scales are surprisingly annoying to play on guitar. They’re much harder to play than the pentatonic or blues scales. Here are some good fingerings for C major — click through to see them bigger:

The first row shows the open position, so named because it uses open strings. The second row shows a closed-position fingering that fits conveniently between the seventh and tenth frets. Use your index finger on the seventh fret, your middle on the eighth, your ring on the ninth and your pinkie on the tenth. This is a nice fingering because you can slide it up and down the neck to easily form any other major scale.

The bottom row shows arpeggios of all the chords diatonic to C major. This exercise is a challenge, so take it slowly, and try to get it to sound musical and rhythmic. Play it backwards too. Mastering your arpeggios can inspire tons of melodic ideas, and will make your solos much richer and more structured.

See this web site for more major scale guitar fingerings. There are a lot of them, and they can make you crazy. My advice is to really master the ones above first. Then learning the rest of them will be less daunting.

Modes

Not only does the C major scale contain seven awesome chords, but it also includes six other scales. This is a complex topic that gets a post of its own, but the basic idea is simple. By playing the scale starting and ending on notes other than C, you get an assortment of exciting new sounds.

• If you play C major from D to D, you get a scale called D Dorian. This is a minor scale that goes well with the Dm7 chord. It’s great for funk and sixties jazz.
• If you play C major from G to G, you get a scale called G Mixolydian, which fits well over G7. This is a crucial scale for rock and roll.
• If you play C major from A to A, you get A natural minor. This is the basis of the key of A minor, the relative minor key to C major.

Major scale in action

Most of the European-descended nursery rhymes use the major scale: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and so on. Tons of pop and folk songs, hymns, theme songs and jingles use it too, everything from “Amazing Grace” to “Good King Wenceslas” to “Imagine.”

In classical music, the major scale is traditionally used for bright, happy moods: think of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or the William Tell Overture. The scale can be tragic or majestic, too, if played slowly enough. My favorite example is Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, opus 132, 3rd movement. This is one of the most depressing pieces of music I can think of, and it’s all major.

The major scale can be bland and vanilla-sounding, but it’s all in the execution. Björk’s beautiful “Anchor Song” sounds crunchy and dissonant, but it’s entirely in the major scale. She just chooses surprising combinations of notes, arranged in rhythmically surprising ways. (Unfortunately, the sound and image in this video aren’t lined up well.)

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” talks through the diatonic chords in the major scale in its first verse: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift.” Those major-scale chords might be well-worn cliches, but we’re nowhere near exhausting their possibilities.

Hear all the tracks sampled on One For All, via Kevin Nottingham’s awesome blog.

The track “Slow Down” in particular jumped out at me.

“Slow Down” uses some samples of the usual hip-hop suspects: “Kool It (Here Come The Fuzz)” and “NT” by Kool & The Gang, and “Let’s Take It To The Stage” by Funkadelic. It also samples a less expected song, “What I Am” by Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians. Usually hip-hop producers use material of previous decades, but “What I Am” was only a year or two old when Brand Nubian sampled it.

“What I Am” is perfect for sampling. It has a great funky-reggae groove and two killer hooks, Kenny Withrow’s sliding sus-2 chord guitar riff and Edie’s slightly edgy voice singing “What I am is what I am.” Besides Brand Nubian, here are some other folks who have sampled it:

• New Edition – “Something About You”
• Aretha Franklin ft Lauryn Hill – “A Rose Is Still A Rose”
• Intro – “Love Thang”
• Smokin’ Suckaz wit Logic – “Mutha Made ‘Em”

These tracks do more justice to “What I Am” than the original song itself. Due respect to Edie and her band, but once you get past the guitar hook and the chorus, the song is extremely inane. The lyrics are like a parody of dopey neo-hippiedom. There’s a rich tradition in hip-hop of finding a jewel of a sample buried in a less-than-jewel-like song, like the Apache break’s origin in a disco cover of a goofy quasi-Western instrumental.

Another surprising bit of Brand Nubian source material is in “Feels So Good,” when they quote Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are.” Not too many hip-hop artists shout out Billy Joel. Props.

The Roy Ayers piano riff in “Wake Up (Reprise In The Sunshine)” was immediately familiar to me.

The sample took me a few listens to place. I finally figured out that it appears in stretched-out form in Björk’s remix of “I Miss You” from Telegram. No wonder she has so much hip-hop cred.

Update: I just found out that Lord Jamar and Sadat X are on Twitter. This is an exciting time to be a fan.

Iceland

Björk famously is from Iceland. She did for her homeland what the Beatles did for Liverpool — she put her country on the hipster map forever. Anna and I were lucky enough to get to go, and we’re looking forward to hopefully going back. It’s an easy place to be an American tourist. Almost everyone speaks English with a BBC inflection, except one guy who did a flawless California surfer dude. The accent is a little otherworldly — all the r’s are rolled, even the ones in the middle of words.

Icelandic shares a common ancestor with English in the not very distant past. Two languages are alike in a few weirdly specific ways. Icelandic and English are unusual for both using the th sound. Icelandic has two different letters of the alphabet devoted to it: one voiced, as in that, the other unvoiced, as in thing. Tolkien’s Elvish is partially based on Icelandic, thus mithrandir and mithril and way Sir Ian McKellan rolled the r’s in Sauron and Mordor. Mirkwood comes from mirk, the Icelandic word for forest. So outside Reykjavik is Thorsmirk, Thor’s Forest. I was in nerd heaven with the road signs.

They wanted to shoot Lord Of The Rings in Iceland but it was going to be too expensive. It would be a perfect spot to shoot science fiction if money were no object. Iceland has volcanos and glaciers and black cliffs looming over black sand beaches with puffins circling over them. There are places where superheated steam just shoots out of the ground with jet engine force. There are earthquakes and landslides and occasional catastrophic eruptions. We went by a restaurant that bakes bread by burying it three feet underground and leaving it there for a few hours. The middle of the country is like Yellowstone if it was on the moon.

Björk and sampling

Björk has access to the same popular culture as any European with a music background, but she’s viewing it through this peculiar cultural lens. Nobody interprets the computer music they play in clubs and at raves quite like Björk does. She comes from classical training, so she mostly writes on the keyboard. But she uses samples too, or at least her producers and collaborators do. They choose their samples well. Here’s one of her first big hits, “Human Behavior,” produced by Nellee Hooper.

Here’s a mashup I did of the Quincy Jones/Ray Brown tune, every version of “Human Behaviour” I have, and a hip-hop track by Heiroglyphics:

Human Behaviour Megamix by ethanhein

Samplers and remixers love Björk. Here’s my favorite usage of a Björk sample, in the remix of “Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee” by Missy Elliot and Timbaland. At the end it uses the cello part from “Jóga.”

Here’s a diagram of all of Björk’s samples and quotations. Click to see it bigger.

Björk and remixing

Almost every Björk tune is a remix of a remix right out of the box. The tracks she releases are wildly different from what she works out on the keyboard or on paper. She and her producers use Pro Tools to merge composition, notation, performance and recording together, the way Brian Eno does with tape recorders.

Once everything is all gridded out in the audio editor, it’s easy to do alternate mixes and versions. You can toss chunks of audio in and out of the grid effortlessly, so you can do radical remixing just by muting and unmuting a few tracks. Björk has released quite a lot of these alternative versions officially. Every single she puts out is backed by three or four remixes. She’s put out entire albums and compilations of them, like Telegram, which is mostly remixes of the tracks on Post.

Björk naturally takes a relaxed attitude toward unauthorized remixes, and has managed to convince her label and management to be cool about them too. As a result, the internet is loaded with Björk fan music. There are web sites like bjorkremixes.com and the bjork remix web archive. “Army Of Me” in particular seems to inspire a lot of new interpretations.

Maybe this is due to its hybrid nature, since the song itself includes drums from “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin and “Get Thy Bearings” by Donovan. Björk releaseda charity album comprised entirely of “Army Of Me” remixes and covers. The standout is the unhinged Morris dancing version by Dr Syntax ‘n’ CB Turbo vs Rivethead. There’s also a bluegrass version, a metal version and a lot of terrifying experimental techno.

Björk’s singing and songwriting

And how could we not talk about her voice? Björk’s unearthly, chameleon-like sound gives her music some of the same pleasures as Michael Jackson’s, who she quotes explicitly in “I Go Humble.” The first paragraph of this quote of Thomas Bartlett’s Salon article could just as easily refer to MJ.

‘Childlike’, ‘feral’, ‘alien’: All three words have been used repeatedly in describing her pipes, and their apparent incompatibility alone gives some sense of just how unusual the sound is. Billie Holiday’s voice famously combined childishness with world-weary wisdom. Björk has pushed the paradox a little further, combining childishness with ferocity and unbridled sexuality.

She is the only major songwriter in recent memory for whom the apparently inescapable influence of Bob Dylan is irrelevant. Her lyrics stand out for a simple reason: They don’t rhyme. Other songwriters have experimented with non-rhyming lyrics, of course, notably Lou Reed and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, but it remains an unusual technique.

David Byrne is another great user of nonrhyming lyrics. Björk’s vocal melodies and lyrics remind me of ee cummings, whose peoms she has set to music a couple of times.

Her phrases are anything but regular; rather than a series of four-bar phrases, she might have one of three followed by two of five, finished with one of four.

Even more singular, her melodic phrases often display little or no connection to the beats beneath them. The melodies themselves are often developed through motifs, with short phrases repeated and elaborated, in a manner more similar to Brahms than to other popular songwriters. Björk’s ten years of conservatory training show here — the influence of the composers she despised is clearly in evidence. Listen to the opening of “Hidden Place” from Vespertine: The verse melody is a four-note motif, resolved differently each time. It repeats more frequently as it becomes more agitated, never matching up comfortably with the beat beneath it. Finally, it snowballs into the chorus.

Because of these irregular melodic phrases and unrhymed lyrics, it always takes a moment to adjust to Björk’s songs. They can sound clumsy at first, strangely forced, unfocused or simply incomprehensible. The end result, though, is that her music has a freshness, an air of the unexpected, that is unusual. In most pop songs, an attentive listener can pick up the basic structure almost immediately. Consciously or not, he or she anticipates the rhymes, the call and response of the phrases. Björk’s songs keep even the most exacting listeners a little off balance. There are no rhymes to guess at, no way of predicting what will come next. They force you to listen intensely.

As a songwriter, Björk is less of a pop musician and more like an avant-gardist with enough personal charisma to have attracted a pop-scale audience. She’s the only contemporary songwriter I can think of who will set a whole tune in diminished scale, as in “An Echo, A Stain.” She uses melodic minor and lydian on “Possibly Maybe” and lydian dominant on “Pluto.” Even when she writes in plain-vanilla major scale, her angular phrasing can make it sound awkward and dissonant, as on “Anchor Song.”

Björk and jazz

The harmonic and rhythmic complexity of her music makes Björk irresistible to jazz musicians. What’s a jazz arrangement but an analog remix? Every jazz group I’ve ever been in has done her tunes. Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra is a seventeen-piece big band based in NYC that plays nothing but tunes by or associated with her. Their arrangements are a little too fuzak for me, but it’s such a cool idea. I think NYC could do with some more all-Björk jazz bands. This city at one point had two different rock bands who only played songs about hockey. Surely we can support more Björkestras. Björk herself did a jazz album called Gling-Glö with an Icelandic trio, which was a good idea but sadly is nothing too special in its execution. I’d like to hear her do more jazz, but maybe not with Icelandic musicians, who, and I say this with all due respect, play extremely white.

Björk’s sonic palette

Sonically, Björk’s palate is as diverse as anyone who’s ever recorded. She seems to be one of the only high-profile white musicians who understands that rock and roll is over. There’s almost no guitar in any of her work. There’s a sample of distorted electric guitar on “Human Behavior,” nylon-string guitar on “So Broken,” pedal steel on live versions of “Possibly Maybe” — I think that’s about it. Her stringed instrument accompaniment of choice is the harp.

Like the hip-hop artists she admires, Björk contrasts her vocal asymmetry with the posthuman perfection of electronic beats. Most of her tunes rest on four-four grids, using drum loops and MIDI patterns in groups of two and four and eight and sixteen. Björk brings out the best in her tech-savvy collaborators. Nellee Hooper’s work with Massive Attack can sound too much like the lobby of a high-end hotel, but behind Post he’s brilliant. Matmos albums are so experimental as to be unlistenable, but on Vespertine, they’re heartbreaking. More from Thomas Bartlett:

Her wholehearted embrace of electronics, combined with her unquestioned dominance of them, makes her our most optimistic musician, blasting the matrix apart.

It’s ironic that this guy should describe Björk as such an optimist, because from what I can tell, she’s also a high-functioning clinical depressive with social phobia.

Björk and depression

I’ve noticed that Björk’s lyrics make several references to suicidal ideation and self-harm. From “Hyperballad:”

Every morning I walk towards the edge
and throw little things off
like car parts, bottles and cutlery
I imagine what my body would sound like
slamming against those rocks
and when I land, will my eyes be closed or open?

From “All Neon Like:”

Don’t get angry with yourself
I’ll heal you
with a razor blade
I’ll cut a slit open

The video for “Pagan Poetry” includes graphic closeups of Björk’s flesh being pierced with large needles. Some of my friends think she might be kidding. She isn’t. Her body language in interviews and onstage indicates to me that she’s as serious as a heart attack.

This is music’s greatest optimist? In a way, yes. Björk’s affect may be bleak at times, but it doesn’t keep her from being a fearless sonic adventurer. The coolest and weirdest track on Telegram is “My Spine,” a duet between Björk and the deaf Scottish classical percussion sensation Evelyn Glennie playing a set of tuned exhaust pipes. You have to be confident to be a deaf drummer. You have to be confident to be an Icelandic person singing in English. You have to be confident to play very far outside the standard western tuning system on a weird instrument. And you have to be confident to stick this song in the middle of a bunch of remixes of your previous album.

Live electronica

All electronic musicians face a challenge when it comes time to play live. Standing onstage and pressing “play” on your DAT machine or laptop is pretty lame. Björk’s solution is an ingenious one. She has a DAT of the basic tracks, the drums and crucial synths. Then she can layer whatever live sounds on top that she wants. So, like, she can tour with a tabla player, harpist and pedal steel, or a symphonic string section, a choir and two laptop guys, or ten horn players, a drummer and a reactive touch surface controller. Because the beats are sequenced, her onstage drummers are free to play outside of grid mode. Hear Björk and Konono No 1 live in concert, courtesy of NPR.

Björk did MTV Unplugged early in her solo career and took the opportunity to do analog remixes of her first album right down to the foundations. “Human Behavior” is just voice and harpsichord, and then “One Day” has like thirty-five percussionists. Happening!

Here are a couple of my Björk remixes. As she says in “Enjoy:” enjoy.

Human Nature And Behaviour by ethanhein

Follows a blog post about the MJ song.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

See blog posts about Lil Wayne and Björk.

Me vs Alex Torovic vs VOCE vs the Wu-Tang Clan vs Aphex Twin vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

India

Me vs John Coltrane ft Eric Dolphy vs Aphex Twin vs Beyoncé vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

Computers can pseudorandomly generate playlists. That’s also what human DJs do. So does that mean that human DJs could someday be replaced entirely by laptops? So far, nothing an individual computer can do comes close. Computers can take a batch of songs and play them in a random order, and that can sound okay when you carefully pick the batch of songs. But you, the human making the playlist, are still doing most of the intellectual heavy lifting.

Internet radio stations come closer to mimicking human DJs than standalone computer software like iTunes. Internet radio stations like Pandora try to sequence tracks semi-randomly, semi-automatically in a way that you’ll enjoy. Internet radio draws on big databases filled with metadata on what makes one song like or unlike another song.

A good database like Pandora’s isn’t a simple spreadsheet layout. Pandora draws on a giant online database called the Music Genome Project. It sprawls along dozens of information dimensions and was assembled laboriously by hand by a panel of musicians and DJs and programmers and executives.Instead of grouping tracks into unambiguous genres like iTunes annoyingly does, Pandora uses non-exclusive tags, in a process that I imagine works a lot like Delicious or Flickr tagging.

To listen to Pandora, you start by typing in the name of a song, artist or genre. Pandora then has some quasi-random process by which it serves up tracks that match as many tags with your starting point as possible. You can give each song a thumbs up or thumbs down, and as it accumulates your votes it makes better guesses as to what you’ll like. Sometimes these guesses are on-point, and sometimes they miss completely.

I started my Pandora adventure by giving it something easy: “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West. It played me some of Kanye’s hits, then some of his more obscure tracks, then tracks by other artists where he does guest verses. Then it segued into Common and Jay-Z. So far, so good. I tried Gang Starr, and Pandora was similarly successful, lining up a string of golden age hip-hop classics. Then I tried giving it Thelonious Monk solo piano. It did better than I expected, playing quality fifties bebop, heavy on Sonny Rollins. Monk’s music might be peculiar, but I guess there’s so much jazz writing out there that the Pandora people had plenty of help giving nuance to their descriptive tags.

So Pandora does great with well-defined genres and styles. But it doesn’t do so hot with outliers and edge cases. In response to Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, it serves up “Cantaloupe Island,” okay, but then it follows with some lame New Jack Swing, then, jarringly, “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco. I wanted early hip-hop and electro. After its few weak stabs at jazz, Pandora gave me synth pop. I understand why it did that, but it’s not what I was looking for.

Pandora did even worse with Björk.

In response to “Jóga,” Pandora served up one so-so Goldfrapp song and then a bunch of bland electronica with anonymous-sounding female vocals. Some of Björk’s music resembles the stuff you hear in the lobbies of hip hotels. Some of it wildly doesn’t. If you’re after artists who sound like Björk, there aren’t any. There are artists who sound totally unlike her but appeal to the same people, namely me, because they’re weird and experimental sometimes and make you want to dance sometimes.

So Pandora fails at Björk. In fairness to the people behind Pandora, her supposed genre or style is a terrible predictor of whether you’ll like her or not. Plenty of people I know who love dark, moody electronica can’t stand Björk. Most of the jazz musicians I know adore her. Every jazz group I’ve ever been in has played at least one of her tunes. NYC has a seventeen-piece big band that plays nothing but her music. Björk might seem like an odd fit for hip-hop lovers, but Timbaland sampled “Jóga” on a Missy Elliot remix and the Wu-Tang Clan namechecks her.

My initial reaction to Björk as a college student was: immediate, strong dislike. It took me years of constant exposure from my sister and friends to change my mind. Now Björk occupies a prominent spot close to the center of my musical affections, close to Coltrane. Who, now that I think about it, I also wasn’t too wild about on the first hearing. People are weird and unpredictable in the evolution of our likes and dislikes.

Pandora fails with Björk for the same reason Netflix has a hard time with Napoleon Dynamite.

The computer world has shown great ingenuity in the past few decades at creating bigger and more intricate databases. But there are intrinsic limits to the kinds of information a database can represent. Computers are good at two things: strictly following unambiguous instructions, and producing total randomness (or pseudorandomness that’s close enough to random to fool us humans.) Computers aren’t so good at blending the random and the structured.

I think we can expect computer DJs to continue to get better at predicting our predictable tastes, and to not make much progress on the unpredictable ones. Pandora might do a better job making playlists than people who aren’t very serious about music, but I don’t think that computers will ever have anything on professional club DJs. There are too many variables to quantify.

What’s most interesting to me about quasi-random database managers like Itunes shuffle and Pandora is the way they inform my own selectional process. I love shuffling within my own carefully cultivated playlists. The real value is the way the computer gives me unexpected items to choose from, which I then apply human emotional intelligence to.

My friends in the academic music world are very interested in algorithmic composition right now, where the computer generates semi-random strings of notes within certain rule sets. I find nearly all of these compositions to be unlistenable. I do enjoy trying out random MIDI sequences as a source of inspiration, but the real music-making happens in my rejection of most of those sequences, and my editing and adaptation of the best ones. So it goes at the playlist level too.

What makes John Bonham’s drums on this track so staggeringly heavy? Partially it’s his playing, and partially it’s the innovative production. Bonham’s performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse in England. Bonham played a brand new drum kit at the bottom of a big stairwell. The microphones were placed at the top of the stairs three stories above. The stairwell created a huge natural reverb, making the sound both big and powerful, and oddly diffuse and distant. To make the drums sound even more humungous, the band slowed the tape down a little, lowering the pitch and giving the track a thick, sludgy quality.

Zeppelin only ever played “When The Levee Breaks” live a couple of times. On the recording, the tempo is seventy beats per minute, which is a tempo more usually associated with ballads. It’s very hard to maintain a heavy groove when you’re playing that slow. Also, it’s impossible to replicate the timbre of the pitch-shifted drums acoustically. It’s as if “Levee” was meant to live purely in the electronic realm.

The drum intro to “Levee” has been irresistible to samplers. It’s easy to grab it, loop it and put your own sounds on top. Hip-hop producers have been the main users of the loop, but it pops up in other genres too. So, for instance, there’s this song called “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” by Sophie B Hawkins. It’s glassy nineties alternapop, a style that I generally don’t have much use for, but it does have a nice groove. I found myself doing the white man’s overbite to it in line at the coffee shop one day. So I looked it up on the Rap Sample FAQ, and was delighted to find out that the beat is a sped-up sample of “Levee.” The sample also appears in “Army Of Me” by Björk, “Lyrical Gangbang” by Dr Dre, two Depeche Mode songs, three Beastie Boys songs and a whole bunch of others.It’s fitting that the “Levee” break has been so widely appropriated, since the Zeppelin song is itself appropriated from an older work. Like so many British rock songs of the period, it’s an adaptation of an old Delta blues tune. “Levee” was written and first recorded by Memphis Minnie in 1929.

The song is about the upheaval caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which destroyed many homes and crippled the agricultural economy of the Mississippi Basin. Farm workers were forced to flee to the cities of the Midwest in search of work, part of the large-scale black urban migration of the first half of the twentieth century. “When The Levee Breaks” is one of many blues songs written about the flood. It focuses on the evacuation of more than thirteen thousand black plantation workers from Greenville, Mississippi. They were moved to a nearby unbroken levee and forced to pile sandbags on it at gunpoint. After the levee breached, the workers weren’t allowed to leave the area. Instead, they were forced to work in the relief and cleanup effort, living in camps with limited access to supplies. Are you getting a Katrina tingle?

Zeppelin’s version is very different from the Memphis Minnie original, musically and lyrically. Still, it’s recognizably derivative. A big chunk of Zep’s early catalog bites from American blues musicians. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant complain bitterly about all the unauthorized sampling of their stuff, which I think is hilarious. Maybe they should just call it even.

Here’s a mashup of many of the tracks mentioned here:

When The Levee Breaks Megamix by ethanhein

Update: see a blog post on how to program this break on a drum machine.