For hip-hop, sampling and everything related:

• Questlove
• Kevin Nottingham
• Whosampled
• Grown Folks Music
• Wayne Marshall
• Hank Shocklee
• Jeff Chang

For technology:

• Deb Chachra
• Tara Busch
• Paul Lamere

For the highbrow and avant-garde:

• Marc Weidenbaum
• Nick Seaver

Just generally:

• DJ Rupture
• Sasha Frere-Jones
• Sarah Badr

Happy reading.

Original question on Quora

Before “Believe,” Auto-tune was used for its intended purpose: to correct vocal performances in a natural-sounding, transparent way. Cher’s producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they turned the Retune Speed setting to zero, it produced the futuristic robot sound we’ve all come to know well. Since they were producing a high-tech dance track, they figured that the robot sound fit the mood, so they kept it in.

I doubt that Taylor and Rawling were the first people to discover the zero retune speed setting, but they were the first to use it on a mass-market commercial recording. To keep other people from imitating the sound, they told interviewers that they had achieved the effect with a vocoder. The music press repeated their story endlessly, so to this day there’s widespread confusion about the difference between vocoder and Auto-tune.

Original question on Quora

Wikipedia tells me that the Donner Party was a group of nineteenth century American pioneers who set out for California in a wagon train. They spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and as supplies ran out, some resorted to cannibalism, eating those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.

Why did Donner Social name themselves after this bleak story? Maybe it just suits their mood. They make eighties-flavored synth-pop with a mostly despairing vibe, like a more depressive Depeche Mode. Donner Social inhabits the same chilly, posthuman musical environments as the Postal Service, MGMT and Crystal Castles. At times, they evoke a more low-key LCD Soundsystem. All of these groups share a commitment to meticulous synth programming and futuristic soundscapes, as well as an allergy to funk.

Donner Social’s major strong suit is their vocal production. Their voices are distorted, Auto-tuned and vocoded until they sound like another keyboard. At times, the thick processing obscures the lyrics, but that’s okay, the ambiance is the important thing. The best vocal production moment happens at the end of “Dear _____,” a digital stutter that gives the song a sudden rhythmic kick. I wouldn’t hearing some more chopped up vocal samples, I think these guys could borrow a page from Prefuse 73.

While the songs are all rhythmic and beat-driven, they aren’t beats suited for the club. This is solitary headphone music, not party music. The angular, off-kilter beats on “There Will Come Soft Rains” reference the more experimental reaches of electronica inhabited by Aphex Twin and Autechre. The lyrics match the bleakness of the settings, dealing with loneliness and alienation. Weirdly, the most uplifting song is the one with the darkest title, “Hospital Beds To Funeral Homes.” With its bright, major-key synths, it works as a high-tech medical love song. The Donner Social’s future might be dark, but it isn’t entirely without warmth.

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

Duke Ellington – “Half The Fun”

Paired with an incredible Sam Woodyard drum part. I love sampling it:

Nature Boy megamix by ethanhein

Duke Ellington – “Fleurette Africaine”

Charles Mingus’ strumming on the intro might be the most beautiful few bars he ever played. Hear a mashup I did of this tune and some other jazz classics:

Autumn Leaves by ethanhein

The Beatles – “Dear Prudence”

I could have chosen any of a dozen Beatles tunes here, I love those McCartney lines. But this one has the most emotional power for me. Here’s a blog post about it, and here’s a mashup I did of “Dear Prudence” with “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5:

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time”

From my favorite of Miles’ funk albums. Read a blog post about it.

James Brown – “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”

Pretty sure that’s Bootsy Collins playing bass, and he kills it.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”

Here’s a visualization I made of this loop.

Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”

Read more about this track, and check out the megamix:

Once In A Lifetime megamix by ethanhein

Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”

Of course.

Janet Jackson – “What Have You Done For Me Lately”

The song that made the Latelybass sound famous.

Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes”

Bakithi Kumalo on the fretless makes this tune for me.

Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”

Love those Teddy Riley sequenced lines.

Digable Planets – “Rebirth Of Slick”

The bassline is sampled from “Searchin’” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but the Digables flipped it into something new.

Black Sheep – “The Choice Is Yours”

Another creative flip of a jazz sample, from McCoy Tyner’s recording of “Impressions.”

Morphine – “Buena”

No embedding; click the image to hear the song:

Two-string slide bass and baritone sax!

Daft Punk – “Around The World”

Never get tired of this one.

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Kanye has been using tuned 808 kick drums to play his basslines lately, which is a dazzlingly hip idea. The kick and the bass are supposed to be in tight sync anyway; why not just fuse them into a single part? I know he’s a ridiculous human being in a lot of ways but the man knows how to put a track together.

Let me know if I missed anything critical, I’m sure I did.

Original post on Quora

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

“Amen, Brother” is an uptempo adaptation of “Amen” by Jester Hairston, written for the movie Lilies of the Field, and made famous by The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield, before he went solo.)

“Amen, Brother” didn’t get much attention until crate-digging hip-hop producers started sampling the drum break in the 1980s. Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Since then, the break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen shows up in rock and pop songs ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It’s in TV theme songs and commercials. Casual music listeners have probably heard it in dozens if not hundreds of recordings. Here’s a family tree showing the most noteworthy usages.

As is so often the case in sample history, GC Coleman never got a dime from any of these uses beyond his union scale for the original recording session. He died in 2006, so there’s not much we can do for him now, but I think he at least deserves some recognition.

Inside the break

Here’s the Amen break, looped four times:

Amen break by ethanhein

Wikipedia has handy drum notation and drum machine tablature for the break.

Here’s how the break looks in the sampling program Recycle:

Each blue spiky blob is a drum hit. The vertical lines are slices I added using Recycle. Once you’ve sliced up the loop, you can play the slices back in any order and any combination using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. You can generate an infinite variety of new loops this way.

Two documentaries on the Amen break

The usual reference for the Amen break is this twenty-minute video by Nate Harrison.

Here’s an hour-long podcast on the break by Crissy Criss:

Noteworthy Amen break samples

I’m not attempting anything resembling completeness here; these are just tracks I like or find interesting. Starting in the eighties with the old skool, here’s “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix.

In “I Desire,” Salt N Pepa mixes the Amen with drums from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the synth line from “Daisy Lady” by 7th Wonder.

Maybe the best-known hip-hop usage of the Amen is NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (very, very NSFW.)

The break appears in pitched-down form at the very beginning of “Informer” by Snow. What the heck is he saying in the chorus, anyway?

As I said above, the Amen is most closely associated with drum ‘n’ bass, for example “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja.

Luke Vibert did an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews where just about every song uses a variation on the Amen break.

An artsier take on the Amen: “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin.

Even artsier: Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife.”

David Bowie uses the Amen for his foray into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, “Little Wonder.” It’s not one of his strongest tunes but he gets huge points for trying.

The most current hip-hop song I could find that uses the Amen is Lupe Fiasco’s “Streets On Fire.”

Many, many more examples can be found on the Amen Break Database and Whosampled.com.

The Amen break on TV

As the Nate Harrison documentary points out, the Amen pops up in quite a few TV commercials. It’s made its way into some theme songs, too, most notably the one from Futurama:

The Amen also shows up in the Powerpuff Girls theme song.

Do you still think that sampling is stealing? I don’t mean monetarily, I mean artistically. Do you think that there’s something unoriginal in all these uses of the Amen break? Do you think that the way Aphex Twin or Lupe Fiasco recontextualizes the break is somehow a lesser creative act than getting out a drum kit and playing something? You can probably guess where I stand.

Why is the Amen break so magical?

Producers talk about how funky and passionate the Amen is, how compressed and dirty the drum sounds are, how much hip syncopation it uses in its second half. But what if there’s a mathematical explanation for the break’s popularity? Michael Schneider has a theory that the Amen Break sounds so good because it’s structured around the golden ratio.

Is there anything to this theory? You be the judge.

Try it yourself

Here’s my mashup of many of the above tracks, with heavy processing of the Amen break in Recycle and Reason.

Amen Brother megamix by ethanhein

If you want to play too, the internet is full of resequenced and reshuffled variations on the Amen break available for your downloading pleasure. Here are a hundred fifty Amen loops. Here’s another forty and yet another twenty. Stick them in your favorite audio editor and have fun!

Miles and Eno seem radical, but in a way, they’re just boiling the usual compositional process down to its raw essentials. Really, all composition and songwriting consist of improvising within constraints and then sequencing the best ideas into shape. Usually this improvisation happens in short spurts, inside the composer’s head or alone at an instrument. Using a recording device instead of a sheet of paper can make the process more bodily and immediate, and can help get at playful ideas that might not squeak past the mind’s internal judges and editors during the relatively slow process of writing stuff on paper. Michael Jackson wrote his best stuff by improvising into a tape recorder. There’s something about improvising a performance while being recorded that focuses the mind wonderfully.

Since 2004 I’ve been writing and recording with Barbara Singer in different configurations. The first version was her idea, a band called Blopop. She had some techno versions of pop songs programmed into her MC-909 groovebox, and the idea was that she’d sing and DJ, and I’d improvise guitar on top.

Both Barbara and I come from jazz training, and both of us felt boxed in playing standards. Free jazz wasn’t that interesting to us either; it felt too chaotic and self-indulgent, too disconnected from the musical world we live in. Babsy had the bright idea to use electronic beats and loops as the basis for improvising. Her original concept was to use pop songs as the basis for improv. We did a little performing that way, but then quickly moved into completely open-ended blowing over beats.

Brian Eno has all kinds of different systems for imposing order on his in-studio improvising. For us the system was to use the presets in Barbara’s groovebox. The generic techno grooves programmed into the box establish  a key and a vibe, so you just set the tempo and you’re off to the races. In a perfect world we would have programmed everything ourselves from scratch, but there was something wonderfully effortless and expedient about just dialing through the presets at random.

Babsy is an improv comedian, a veteran of various improv groups and a student of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We talked a lot about the improv comedy bible Truth In Comedy and how applicable it is to music too. If you’re confident, responsive to the other performers, and genuinely focused on the present moment, you really can’t do anything wrong.

Constrained improvisation is a perfect meditation exercise. I learned firsthand what the Buddhists always say, that it takes a lot of practice and discipline to be maximally effortless and intuitive. I’ve enjoyed few activities more than freeform musical improv over techno beats. Completely free improv can be a pleasure too, but it can also be a pain, since it usually devolves into formless noodling. The beats give enough structure to make the process fun. Here are some of our attempts to put the Truth In Comedy principle into action.

See

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Improvisation recorded during the first time Barbara and I were ever in a room together, in the summer of 2004. Babsy is in the excellent habit of recording pretty much every note she plays or sings. I was a little taken aback when she wanted to record our first session, but went along. This isn’t edited, or even mixed. I pick a starting note at random, which turns out to be the flat seventh of the synth loop’s key. That establishes the main riff I have to work off of. This element of harmonic randomness ended up being a big part of the band’s pleasure for me, having to puzzle out a good-sounding relationship between the note I picked to start on with whatever came out of the groove box.

Warmup

mp3 download, ipod format download

Another unedited improv, recorded a month later than the one above. As the title suggests, this was just to get limbered up at the beginning of a session. It fades out once I lose the thread.

Everything We Do Is Right

mp3 download, ipod format download

Maybe our best attempt at a longer-form improv.

Window remix

mp3 download, ipod format download

Edited from over half an hour down to eight or so minutes. The original contains all these ideas, but they’re separated by some stretches of aimless wandering, and with looser repetition. I like it better this way.

Listening now, this stuff doesn’t nearly as tight or focused as our more pop and remix-oriented material we eventually moved into. But I admire the spirit of adventure behind it. My guitar playing certainly improved enormously under the pressure of all that recorded improvising. We never remotely found an audience for this music. It was too weird and avant-garde for the dance music people, not weird enough for the avant-garde, too unfocused and unpredictable for pop fans, too electronic for jazz fans. Still, I think it was a cool idea, one that I don’t think we came close to exploring completely. I’m still interested in pursuing this format further. Anybody out there game for some Eno-flavored freeform techno? Drop me a line.

This is (mostly) a music blog, not a movie blog, so I won’t be doing much heavy criticism of the film, except to say that I thought it was an extraordinarily well-made work of art. I’ve heard all the complaints about how wildly inaccurate it is, and I do wish Sorkin had hewn a little closer to the facts. It would have made Zuckerburg a more complex character. My biggest problem was the one Jesse Walker points out, which is that Aaron Sorkin is a way bigger misogynist than any of the people he portrays in his script. Still and all, the movie is spellbinding in its writing, acting, cinematography, editing and so on.

A big part of the movie’s pleasure is the music, starting with the trailer. It uses a gorgeously unsettling choral arrangement of Radiohead’s “Creep” by a Belgian Women’s choir, called, incongruously, Scala & Kolacny Brothers. This song isn’t in the actual film, which is too bad because it nails its mood perfectly. (The trailer is mildly NSFW.)

The Radiohead original is loaded with angst, but it’s a particularly hard-rocking kind of angst. There’s a little too much swagger to convey the wounded feelings of a wallflower. Real Radiohead fans disdain “Creep,” ostensibly because it’s so popular, but I think really because it feels like a betrayal of the band’s basic geekdom. The choral arrangement feels more like a social anxiety sufferer’s inner life.

There’s a lot of tension and anxiety in the movie: class anxiety, social anxiety, the misery of former friends on opposite sides of a lawsuit. The score is tense and anxious too, but in a subtle and restrained way. It isn’t like the wild dissonant violins from a Hitchcock score. As befits a movie about technology, the music is heavily electronic, but it isn’t club techno like in Fight Club or the Matrix.

Most of the music is by Trent Reznor and his frequent Nine Inch Nails collaborator Atticus Ross. I’m no great NIN fan — I admire the craftsmanship but I’m just not angry enough to keep up. The Social Network score works great, though. It sounds like continuous loops of the quiet parts of NIN songs, which are always my favorite parts. Like a lot of heavy musicians, Trent Reznor is most powerful when his touch is lightest. “The Gentle Hum Of Anxiety” is both the title of a track and a perfect descriptor of his score’s mood. And by the way, huge props to SoundCloud for these groovy embeddable mp3 widgets.

The Gentle Hum of Anxiety

Soft Trees Break the Fall

On We March

This last track is my favorite. There’s a nice balance between the warm acoustic piano on the one hand and the icy 808 drum machine and unearthly synths on the other. It mirrors the struggle between the characters’ feelings of loyalty and the demanding logic of the tech business.

Here, by the way, is my Nine Inch Nails story. My late grandmother saw them on David Letterman at random one night. She was so appalled that she called me the next day to demand an explanation. I guess she thought of me as the cultural ombudsman for Generation X. She said, “When I was young, we had the Great Depression, a world war, the Holocaust. And yet, we listened to happy music: Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Artie Shaw. You kids have everything you could want and you’re so angry. How do you explain that?” I had to really think about it, and I still haven’t resolved the question fully for myself. Part of it is that we expect more emotional truth-telling from our popular music than the Greatest Generation did. That said, there genuinely does seem to be more anxiety floating around my age cohort than there was with my grandparents.

Anyway. There are two conspicuous pieces of music in The Social Network not by Trent Reznor. One is a semi-ironic electronic arrangement of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Reznor says that David Fincher insisted it be used to accompany the tilt-shifted regatta on the Thames. It’s the one really cartoonish moment in the movie. The Winklevoss twins are apparently that absurdly Wagnerian in real life.

The other major non-Reznor song in The Social Network is by the Beatles, and it plays under the final scene and credits. I won’t spoil the ending; suffice to say that the tune isn’t one of the best-known Beatles ones and it’s hilariously appropriate. The licensing must have cost a fortune. It was worth every penny.

Update: Zadie Smith reviews the movie at length in the New York Review Of Books. Well worth reading.

I resisted liking the song because of what I imagined it representing. I mean, watch this video with the sound off, these guys look like incredible douchebags. As a teenager I was very invested in the idea of purity in music, and INXS was the exact opposite of pure. The band was and is a capitalist venture above all else. I hadn’t yet learned that commercial music can be incredibly good, and that pure artistry is no guarantee against awfulness.

“Need You Tonight” was INXS’ biggest hit, but before it dropped there was concern on Atlantic Records’ part about its commercial prospects. Here’s a quote from the band’s manager Chris Murphy, courtesy of the wikipedia:

They hated it, absolutely hated it. They said there was no way they could get this music on rock radio. They said it was suited for black radio, but they didn’t want to promote it that way. The president of the label told me that he’d give us $1 million to go back to Australia and make another album.

This quote makes Atlantic Records seem like racist schmucks, but in fairness, it is kind of amazing that INXS managed to pass off such a pure techno song as rock. The beat is programmed on an icy-sounding drum machine. The guitar lick sounds like it was copied and pasted in Pro Tools. The band had to play the song to a click at shows so the sequenced synth stabs would line up. Aphex Twin produces more organic-sounding tracks than this one. This is nothing against INXS at all — quite the opposite. Their techno-futurism is what makes their song still sound terrific all these years later. Props to producer Chris Thomas, who, by the way, had his first professional studio job playing for some band named the Hollies, and had his second playing keyboards on the White Album, at age 21. I might be just a little bit jealous.

The production isn’t the only reason “Need You Tonight” sounds so hip. It has no chord progression. Like the best Michael Jackson songs, it’s a modal groove. The guitar part and vocal melody are clearly minor, but the synth stab is a major chord. The lyrics are hip too. They don’t rhyme, at all. Michael Hutchence is in a dialog with himself, his low whisper calling, his higher open-throated belt responding. It’s called songcraft, kids. Unfortunately, this song’s pop-cultural context gets in the way of its full enjoyment. Music videos are a terrible way to learn about how music works. What do kids think when they see a drummer miming along with the beat from a drum machine, and miming totally the wrong drums at that?

I’m very surprised to learn the song hasn’t been sampled more. How has Kanye West or someone not wanted to jump on this beat? I could only find two hip-hop tracks that use it. Big Pun and Beenie Man use it on “Make Me Sweat” from the soundtrack to How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which is okay, but not too special. Someone named Professor Green has a tune called “I Need You Tonight” which is pretty dumb. The last word in INXS samples has not yet been spoken. Get to it, MCs! I did find an interesting cover version by St Vincent, and a pretty excellent mashup by DJ McSleazy, who combines it with Neneh Cherry’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

(DJ McSleazy’s mashup of Michael Jackson and the Charlatans is good too.)

I feel obligated to say something about Michael Hutchence’s death, which came at the end of what seems to me like a pretty unhappy life. But you know what? I don’t know anything about it, except what it says on the web, and who knows how much of that is true. Also, I don’t care. I really just like this song.

Revival Revival vs Nirvana

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Vocals and guitar by Barbara. Additional guitar, controller synth, 808 programming and sampling by me. Contains some salty language.

This continues our recent push into mostly original rock material about Barbara’s complex romantic life. The sample comes from one of my favorite Nirvana songs.

Oh, the nineties. I’m not as angry as Kurt Cobain and didn’t have much love for Nirvana in their heyday. But Mr Cobain writes a great melody, and the band has grown on me in my old age. It’s become something of a cliche for young hipster jazz musicians to do Nirvana songs, but they work great, they have those nice doom-filled minor key chord progressions.

I’ve had the “Hey wait” sample sitting on my hard drive for basically ever. Barbara had this song she had written, and we wanted a sample to lay over it to make it more memetastic. “Hey wait” was the first one we tried. Then we tried about seventy other hooks from other hard rock songs, and none of them worked nearly as well. Barbara was pretty excited to work a Nirvana sample into an electronic dance track of the kind Kurt probably hated. I like to imagine that maybe he would have thought it was cool.

Gilbert with a Roland CR-8000 drum machine around his neck! Lamar and Wormser doing the robot dressed as Michael Jackson! Booger dressed as Elvis! If the Lambda Lambda Lambda/Omega Mu was a real band right now, imagine how huge they’d be. The kids love eighties retro. These guys would probably be opening for Lady Gaga, or maybe the other way around.

It occurs to me that the vibe I’ve been working towards all these years is pretty similar to this one. I can’t promise anything this visually arresting at our show tonight, but performing live guitar and vocals over a prerecorded track is exactly what we’ll be doing.

Some of the comedy in this movie hasn’t aged well, but the soundtrack has. I’m particular fond of the song “One Foot In Front Of The Other” by Bone Symphony, which plays under the “fixing up the house” montage. Eighties!