This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School for the first time. Here’s my syllabus. It will probably evolve as we go, but this is the initial plan. This course on “non-original” music explores how frequently existing compositions have been appropriated and adapted into new works, and how these …
Tag Archives: breakbeats
Glenn Gould wanted me to make this remix
Glenn Gould thought people should make their own edits of classical recordings. He explains this idea in greater depth here. I read it and thought, challenge accepted!
Teaching note values
Western music notation is a graph of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (on the horizontal axis.) It’s mostly self-explanatory on the pitch axis, but it’s harder to understand on the time axis. It helps if you visualize your rhythms on a circle, like the Groove Pizza does. Everything I talk about in this …
Learn diatonic harmony from a classic breakbeat
“Blind Alley” by The Emotions is a funk/soul tune best known as a crucial source of breakbeats for golden age rap songs. Beyond its sampling value, “Blind Alley” is also a fabulously useful tool for teaching how you make chords in the key of F major.
Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live
This video recently made the rounds on Facebook: I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I …
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In praise of the Reflex Re-Edit
The Reflex is a London-based French DJ and producer named Nicolas Laugier. He specializes in a particular kind of remix, the re-edit, in which you rework a song using only sounds found within the song itself. Some re-edits keep the original song more or less intact, and just give it a punchier mix, a more …
Rhythmic simples
In the service of teaching theory using real music, I’ve been gathering musical simples: little phrases and loops that are small enough to be easily learned, and substantial enough to have expressive value. See some representative melodic simples, more melodic simples, and compound simples. This post showcases some representative rhythmic simples, more commonly known as …
Remixing Verdi with Ableton Live
Later this week I’m doing a teaching demo for a music technology professor job. The students are classical music types who don’t have a lot of music tech background, and the task is to blow their minds. I’m told that a lot of them are singers working on Verdi’s Requiem. My plan, then, is to …
Composing improvisationally with Ableton Live
I just completed a batch of new music, which was improvised freely in the studio and then later shaped into structured tracks. https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/tabla-breakbeat-science I thought it would be helpful to document the process behind this music, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I expect to be teaching this kind of production a lot …
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Tabla Breakbeat Science is dropping an album
My new studio band has an album nearing completion. It’s called Music Information Retrieval, because our studio time was sponsored by NYU’s Music and Audio Research Lab — we contributed to a database of multitracks that will be used for music informatics research. We made our DJ debut over the weekend at the Rubin Museum, …
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