The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about [...]
Filed in Emotion, Evolution, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged beatles, beyonce, chi-lites, elvin jones, Evolution, jay-z, john coltrane, manu dibango, mashups, memes, michael jackson, monkeysphere, pop, radiohead, remixes, sample maps, Sampling, sarah mclachlan, soul makossa, susan blackmore, tribe, zap mama
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I have a new harmonica student starting today, so while I gather materials for him, I figured I’d put them in a blog post too. I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, deford bailey, folk, harmonica, howard levy, jazz, little walter jacobs, major scale, mixolydian, Music Theory, sonny terry, stevie wonder, toots thielemans
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In keeping with my posts thinking of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix as electronic musicians, I thought I’d round out the techno-hippie trifecta with the Dead. Their fans might lean to the crunchy granola side, and they did some of their most endearing work in unplugged mode, but for the most part the Dead were [...]
My friend Adam, a non-musician but devoted music fan, asked me why sampling is good. He’s used to hearing me defend sampling from the accusation that it’s bad, but he’d never heard a positive argument for it. In case you’ve ever asked the same question, here’s my answer.
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged beyonce, brian eno, chi-lites, copyright, disney, Evolution, fan art, fans, funky drummer, intellectual property, janet jackson, joni mitchell, kickstarter, lil wayne, manu dibango, memes, michael jackson, midi, monkeysphere, Music, public domain, remixes, Sampling, songwriting, swv
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See also a post about the Dead and electronic music. Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding a lot like Jerry Garcia. 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 [...]
Filed in Autobio, Emotion, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Business
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Also tagged audience participation, depression, design, drugs, electronica, fashion, guitar, hippies, janis joplin, jerry garcia, midi, sixties, steal your face, tape trading, viral marketing
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One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged audio, beatles, eighties, ferris bueller, jazz, john hughes, keybs, mellotron, midi, Music, reason, Recording, recursion, Sampling, synths, tape, yello
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