Sunday, February 21, 2010
The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common [...]
Filed in Composition, Evolution, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged cassettes, Evolution, family, genealogy, memes, midi, Music Theory, originality, sample maps, Sampling, sequencing, songwriting
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DJ Kool Herc describes “Apache” by The Incredible Bongo Band as the national anthem of hip-hop. “Apache” includes a famous drum and percussion break that has reliably put bodies on the dance floor through hip-hop’s prehistory:
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged apache, breakdancing, copyright, dance, digging the crates, double dee and steinski, drum n bass, drumming, Evolution, funk, goldie, grandmaster flash, hip-hop, history, kool herc, mashups, memes, missy elliot, nas, pop, questlove, roots, Sampling, seventies
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged electronica, Evolution, funk, funky drummer, hip-hop, james brown, memes, midi, mutation, recursion, recycle, remixes, Sampling, sequencing, songwriting, visualization
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