Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

We are talking about Jamaica’s remix culture in Musical Borrowing class and how it challenges Western concepts of authorship and ownership. The class is reading the opening chapters of Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power by Larisa Kingston Mann, which connects Jamaica’s ethos of communal musical creativity to its postcolonial history. We spent today listening to this delightfully titled dub classic by Scientist to warm up for the discussion.

The album consists of remixed (versioned) reggae songs released in 1981. Many of these songs are sung over remixed (versions) of instrumentals from yet other reggae songs. Scientist created his versions by playing the multitrack tape of each song through a studio mixing desk and re-recording (dubbing) them down to two-track. During recording, he performed various manipulations on the mixing desk: changing the levels of the tracks, muting and unmuting them, and applying audio effects, most notably Roland Space Echo. He carried out these manipulations in real time, with an improvisational approach, giving his versions an unpredictable structure.

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The Song Factory course

I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose only goal is to be a songwriting class. It’s called The Song Factory. I didn’t choose the name, but I like it.

The class is meant to both be a songwriting workshop and a survey of American popular song. My plan is to do six units. For each unit, the class will do some listening, reading and discussion, and then they will write an original song. I am requiring that these songs have lyrics, and the students must sing/rap them in class. I am not particular about how they accompany their vocals. They can play their instruments, record their own backing tracks, or use existing loops, instrumentals, type beats or karaoke tracks. We will talk about composition, arrangement and production a bit, but we will mainly be concerned with the sung/rapped aspect of songwriting.

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Crosseyed And Painless

Since I’m stuck in my apartment with Covid for a while, looks like I have plenty of time to continue my Talking Heads series. Here’s one of their funkiest and most Afrobeat-sounding tracks.

David Byrne always speak-sings to an extent, but this song has an actual rap verse (“Facts are simple and facts are straight…”) Chris Frantz says that he played Byrne “The Breaks” by Kurtis Blow to inspire his delivery. Frantz also says that the song’s title refers to being extremely drunk.

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Take Me To The River

See the complete Talking Heads series

The only cover that Talking Heads ever recorded was a tune co-written by Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges.

Like all Al Green classics, this was produced by the great Willie Mitchell. Teenie’s brothers Charles and Leroy play organ and bass respectively, the drums are by Howard Grimes, the horns are by the Memphis Horns, and the strings are by the Memphis Strings. The Reverend Al dedicated the song to his cousin Junior Parker.

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Brian Eno and the role of the producer

The meaning of the word “producer” has changed significantly over the history of recorded music. Before the 1960s, most record producers were businesspeople, responsible for signing checks and making sure the musicians and engineers did their jobs. Some producers took a creative role in choosing repertoire, arrangements and takes, but others were hands-off. As recording technologies and processes became more complex and further removed from documenting real-time performances, producers started to take on more creative importance. Consider George Martin’s role with the Beatles. For the first few albums, he simply supervised the recording process, but as time went on, he began to write and conduct orchestral arrangements, play instruments, and carry out technical experiments with the band and engineers.

In the 1970s, more artists started to think of the recording studio itself as an instrument, assembling tracks into collages that sometimes bore little resemblance to the original live performances. An album like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was as much a creation of the producers and engineers as the songwriters and musicians. As they started “playing the studio,” album producers became less like film producers and more like film directors. (Meanwhile, recorded music became less like filmed stage plays and more like Pixar or Star Wars movies.)

Brian Eno is a crucial figure in this evolution. It’s significant that his background is in visual art, not music. (Many British rock and pop musicians got started in art school.) Eno has described himself as a “non-musician.” He initially thought of himself as a conceptual artist more than anything. As a student, he experimented with electronic music under the influence of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but he approached these projects as sound art, not as “music” necessarily.

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Making music with students’ found sounds

Every semester, I have my music technology students do a project using found sound. They record environmental sounds with their phones, and then they create tracks that incorporate those sounds somehow. The only rule is that they have to use at least one found sound–it doesn’t have to be their own. Otherwise, they can use whatever other audio, MIDI or loops they see fit. The project satisfies several pedagogical goals. Students get a taste of field recording, and they start thinking about ways to use “non-musical” sounds in musical contexts. Also, because their phone recordings are usually of poor quality, they have to get creative with audio effects. I like to walk the class through my own approach to the project as well. Here’s what I came up with for my current Montclair State University students:

You can download the Ableton session here. I did some of the work before class: downloading a bunch of students’ sounds, identifying the best parts of them, and finding a good breakbeat to put underneath. I did the bulk of the production during class, with feedback from the students. Then I figured out the structure and applied some polish afterwards.

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Music for practicing scales

Are you trying to learn how to improvise with scales and patterns, but finding it hard to make yourself practice? Do yourself a favor, and practice over actual music. A student asked me to make him a playlist of harmonically static music that’s good for practicing over. I thought I would share it with everyone.

The music in this post is perfect for working out scales. Each track stays in a particular key or mode for long stretches of time, and has a slow or medium tempo. You can dig deep into the scales associated with each one without needing to worry about form or rapid chord changes. Click the links to load the aQWERTYon set to the appropriate key and scale.

The Temptations

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” – B-flat Dorian or blues

Miles Davis

Shhh Peaceful” – D Mixolydian (or blues, or major, or really anything)
In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” – slow part is E major (or Lydian, or blues), funky part is F Mixolydian (or blues, or Dorian)

“He Loved Him Madly” – C Phrygian (or blues, or natural minor, or any minor scale)


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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 DJ-friendly intro and ending, and maybe a new breakdown section. Other re-edits (the ones I find more interesting) radically transform their source material by moving pieces around in unexpected ways. Read this Greg Wilson interview to learn more about Laugier’s process.

The Reflex

I love Laugier’s tracks on several levels. First, he has a fine ear for mixing, and his edits always have spectacular clarity and depth, often sounding better than the originals. There’s intellectual pleasure, too: it’s fun to hear a fresh take on these deeply familiar recordings, and the music educator in me adores the idea of using music itself as a medium for music criticism. Laugier implicitly critiques the music he edits, saying, “This song is cool, but wouldn’t it be cooler if the drums were more prominent, and if you could hear this keyboard part in isolation, and if there was a longer groove in the intro?” I always prefer music analysis that I can dance to. Continue reading