My friend Adam suggested combining “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie and “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga. Here’s the result.
Let’s Just Dance
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Revival Revival vs Lady Gaga vs David Bowie
mp3 download, ipod format download
The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording.
I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.
When I was younger I was obsessed with authenticity in music. I wouldn’t even play electric guitar because it felt too easy, like cheating somehow. I expended a lot of energy and attention trying to figure out what is and isn’t authentic. Now, at the age of 34, I’ve officially given up. I doubt there’s even such a thing as authenticity in music, at least not in America. There’s just stuff that I enjoy hearing, and stuff I don’t. But the concept of authenticity meant a lot to me for a long time, and it continues to mean a lot to many of the musicians and music fans I know. So what is it, and why do people care about it?
At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.
Sixties Motown
When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.
In the eighties my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. (more…)
Here’s a live rendition of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide And Seek.” It’s introduced by Zach Braff, but don’t let that dissuade you from watching.
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 samplers and turntables.
To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.
Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.
Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.
Couple of exciting memetic hybrids circulating around the web right now. First, here’s a techno track using samples of Pixar’s Up, which is one of the best and saddest movies ever. Thanks Mike for alerting me to the remix’s existence. Remixing songs is all well and good, but remixing movies, that’s where it’s at.
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I can’t breakdance. I want to learn. It looks like fun. When I worked for the Parks Department I was involved in their afterschool programs. One of them met in the Alfred E Smith Recreation Center in the housing project of the same name. In the basketball gym, Roc-a-fella (the b-girl, not the record label) and her crew taught classes. Some of the people were beginners, and some were advanced Jedi masters. One guy could spin on his head while nonchalantly taking off his jacket. I watched some of those classes and felt as happy as I’ve ever felt watching other people do anything.
Here I’m going to collect some breakdance media and see if any thoughts emerge. Your suggestions welcome.
I’m producing some tracks for a singer-songwriter named Geoff. He’s having me play some acoustic guitar parts in a country-rock style. I play this kind of material exactly like Jerry Garcia would. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. It’s not about drugs. I’ve never tripped on anything. I really did like the music, a lot.
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 making, and I like it up there with the best stuff ever made by anyone.
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So as part of the competitive analysis for my developing book proposal, I’ve been looking at books about electronic music and hip-hop. I’m interested in books about the music itself, its production and content, as well as the lives of people making it and listening to it. Among the books I’ve read, the two real standouts are both about hip-hop. There’s Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, the most ambitious and best work on the subject that I know of.
