Today is the Fourth of July, and I can’t think of anything more patriotic than a post about our most significant contribution to world musical culture: swing. The title of this post refers to the classic Duke Ellington tune, sung here by Ray Nance. Check out the “yah yah” trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton. The [...]
Filed in Dance, Emotion, Music, Music Teaching
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Also tagged america, charles mingus, classical, count basie, duke ellington, ella fitzgerald, funk, hip-hop, janet jackson, jazz, louis armstrong, ray nance, rhythm, soul, swing, syncopation, tchaikovsky, time, tricky sam nanton
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I’m pretty sure that “Need You Tonight” by INXS was the last song I fell in love with through commercial radio. I would never have admitted it, and I couldn’t have articulated why, but oh yes, in middle school this track hit me exactly where I lived. It still sounds as fresh today as it [...]
Filed in Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged eighties, electronica, hip-hop, inxs, mashups, michael jackson, mtv, neneh cherry, pop, Sampling
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I wrote a general post about what makes a hot beat hot. As a followup, here’s how to program some generic patterns and a few famous breakbeats. The basic unit of dance music is a sequence of sixteen eighth notes, two measures of four-four time. Drum machines like the Roland TR-808 represent the sixteen eighth [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged dance, drumming, funky drummer, hip-hop, hone, honey drippers, james brown, led zeppelin, looping, programming, rhythm, rock, time
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Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again.
Filed in Music
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Also tagged candida haynes, eighties, erykah badu, janet jackson, jimmy jam, joni mitchell, mashups, michael jackson, new jack swing, nicole bishop, prince, pro tools, production, q-tip, remixes, revival revival, Sampling, terry lewis
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Saturday, October 3, 2009
Okay, so we’ve all firmly established that he’s not exactly Mr Personality. President Obama called him a jackass. Even before he disrupted the MTV awards, a lot of my friends disliked him intensely. This dislike crosses racial, class and gender boundaries. And yet, I like Kanye’s music better than just about anything that anyone is [...]
Filed in Emotion, Key Musicians, Music, Race and Identity
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Also tagged autotune, depression, electronica, Emotion, hip-hop, kanye west, lil wayne, masculinity, pop, posthuman, remixes, t-pain, taylor swift
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Internet, Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged daft punk, delicious, design, electronica, fun, interface, Internet, inudge, minimalism, multitracking, reason, remixes, sequencing, Social Media, tenori-on, toys, visualization, web browser
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See a followup post about female remixes of “A Milli” Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged america, anxiety, autotune, class, cole porter, comedy, computers, Evolution, hip-hop, Improvisation, irony, kanye west, lil wayne, memes, michael jackson, minimalism, natalie portman, natural selection, Recording, recursion, remixes, Sampling, snl, Social Media, t-pain, white people
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Thursday, August 20, 2009
Hip-hop artists love Prince. Like them, he blends drum machines, live jazz-funk musicians and samples of other songs.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged digging the crates, eighties, george clinton, guitar, keybs, pop, prince, remixes, rock, sample maps, Sampling, synths
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on a stranger’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Key Musicians, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged computers, eighties, electronica, Emotion, funk, herbie hancock, interface, jazz, keybs, Music, quincy jones, sequencing, sesame street, synths
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Herbie Hancock is a musician’s musician. He pushed the boundaries of acoustic piano in the sixties. He found a uniquely personal voice on an array of synthesizers in the seventies. And in the eighties, he helped bring turntablism into the pop mainstream. People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a [...]
Filed in Interfaces, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged breakdancing, digging the crates, eighties, electronica, funk, herbie hancock, hip-hop, jazz, keybs, Music, pop, remixes, sequencing, synths, turntablism, vocoder
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