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.
Posts Tagged ‘harmony’
Imogen Heap and artificial harmony
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Coltrane was an analog remixer
Saturday, November 28th, 2009The current fetish for originality in music is partially an outgrowth of copyright law. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales. The influence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles further created the expectation that popular musicians would mostly be writing their own material. Before the mid-sixties, it was a different story. Pop and jazz artists were mostly interpreting existing, familiar material, and only rarely writing new stuff. Even the most prolific and brilliant jazz composers like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk devoted album after album to arrangements of standards. Nobody arranged standards more radically and personally than John Coltrane.
The emblematic Coltrane remake is “My Favorite Things” from his classic album by the same name. Here’s a live rendition:
Coltrane’s arrangement of this tune bears the same relationship to the one in The Sound Of Music as “Hard Knock Life” by Jay-Z bears to Annie. Jazz arranging uses different technology than sampling and remixing, but it makes the same musical statement. It’s a stamp of personal ownership on a familiar piece of public musical property.
Janet and Michael vs Molly and me
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009Working 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.”
Jimi Hendrix, electronic musician
Monday, July 6th, 2009People 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.
Learning music theory with Auto-tune
Monday, May 4th, 2009Auto-tune makes producing music easier. It can also make understanding music theory easier. The way you dial up different keys and scales doesn’t just guide your ear, it also guides your eye.
Your voice can produce a smooth continuum of pitches. To sing, you eliminate most of those possibilities, vibrating your mouth and throat only at certain frequencies, the pitches of the melody. Auto-tune helps by shifting the voice’s frequency to the closest desired piano-key pitch.
Tuning the quantum guitar
Friday, March 20th, 2009In 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…)