As part of our ongoing commitment to electronica-fy classic rock, may we present:
Born 2B Wylde
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Vocals and arranging by Barbara. Samples, guitar and drum machine programming by me.
The song was written by Mars Bonfire. Best stage name ever! I love this song as music, but its symbolism is a little lost on me. Bla bla bla sixties, open road, freedom, whatever. The biker mythos doesn’t grab me. I’ve never made it all the way through Easy Rider. I do like the poster though.
Meet guitarist and producer Nile Rodgers, one of my favorite musicians in the world. He founded Chic along with the late bassist Bernard Edwards, and he’s on Twitter.
Nile Rodgers has led an action-packed life. As a teenager, he played with the Sesame Street band, and then with the Apollo Theater house band, where he backed such luminaries as Aretha Franklin and P-Funk. He was an active Black Panther. His Allmusic bio lists various NYC bands he played in before forming Chic, including a new wave rock outfit called Allah & The Knife Wielding Punks. He later went on to write most of the disco songs and eighties pop hits that I like, and helped lay the cornerstone of hip-hop. He deserves a blog post and then some.
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Working on Janet Jackson songs made me want to see if she did any tracks with Michael. Here’s what the internet has to say: Michael sings backup vocals on Janet’s early album Dream Street.Janet sings backup on Michael’s “PYT.” She’s in the part towards the end where he says “Pretty young things, repeat after me.”
Janet and Michael have similar musical sensibilities. They like jazz harmony. “Remember The Time” uses C7 flat nine for long stretches. Jazz musicians could go to town on that with diminished scale. Janet uses diminished in the chorus of “What Have You Done For Me Lately.”
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.
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly it had been used as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated control surface.
Say “oooh” as in “noodle.” Then say “aaah” as in “park.” When you say “oooh” your mouth is more closed, with less resonating space and a smaller opening. This configuration blocks the higher overtones of your voice. When you say “aaah” your jaw and lips open, creating more resonating space and letting more high overtones through. Now glide from one to the other. The resulting “ooohaaaah” is the sound the wah-wah pedal is named for. By selectively filtering an electronic instrument’s overtones, the pedal can make it sound more vocal. It’s only two vowel sounds out of the dozens your mouth is capable of producing, but it’s a start toward making a more human tone.
In high school science class, you probably saw a picture of an atom that looked like this:
The picture shows a stylized lithium atom, a nucleus with three red protons and three blue neutrons, surrounded by three grey electrons. It’s an attractive and iconic image, and it would make a great logo. It’s also misleading, and in some physical contexts, totally wrong. There is an extent to which protons, neutrons and electrons are like little marbles, but it’s a limited extent. Electrons do flit around the nucleus, but they don’t do it in elliptical paths as if they’re little moons orbiting a planet. The true nature of electrons in atoms is way weirder and cooler. It’s also counterintuitive, and difficult to draw. Fortunately, we have electronics to help us visualize. (more…)
