Posts Tagged ‘hip-hop’

Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I’ve had a lot of music teachers, formal and informal. The best one has been the computer. It mindlessly plays anything I tell it to, over and over. Hearing an idea played back on a continuous loop tells me quickly if it’s good or not. If the idea is bad, I immediately get annoyed, and if it’s good, I’ll cheerfully listen to it loop for hours. There’s something in the cumulative experience of a loop that makes it greater than the sum of the individual listens. Good loops create a meditative, trance-like state, like Buddhist mantras you can dance to. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s the right groove, there’s no such thing as too much repetition. Take “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.

At the end, they repeat “Naah, na na nanana naah, nanana naah, hey Jude” over and over for four minutes. I could listen to it for forty minutes. Why don’t I get bored? (more…)

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Inside the recording process

Friday, February 26th, 2010

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.

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Le Freak, c’est chic

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

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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Copyright Criminals

Monday, January 25th, 2010

This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.

Part one:

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Apache makes you go hmmm

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

DJ Kool Herc likes to say that The Incredible Bongo Band’s version of “Apache” is the national anthem of hip-hop. Its famous drum and percussion break reliably put bodies on the dance floor through hip-hop’s prehistory and has been sampled untold numbers of times. Here’s the break:

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On the left is the record where the break first appeared, and on the right is DJ Kool Herc.

You could also call the Apache break the national anthem of drum n bass and all the other electronic microgenres based on sped up and scrambled hip-hop beats.

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Resequencing the Funky Drummer’s DNA

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

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.

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Female A Milli remixes

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

We were on our way to Grand Central, on the first leg of our trip north for Thanksgiving. A girl sitting near us on the 4 train had her headphones cranked to where I could recognize the beat as the one from “A Milli” by Lil Wayne. I could also make out that there was a female vocalist singing on top. It sounded pretty cool. I put it out to Twitter to see if anyone knew what it was. Rafi Kam hipped me to Joya Bravo’s freestyle in the back of a dollar van. It’s not the one I was looking for but it’s much better, you do not want to miss it.

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Bitter Sweet Symphony

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

One of the biggest copyright failures of copyright law ever is the The Verve song “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”

The distinctive string sample comes from an orchestral arrangement of “The Last Time” by The Rolling Stones.

Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? The two bands do share a taste in the I – flat VII – IV chord progression. But here’s the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version, the sample will jump right out at you twenty-five seconds in.

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Breakdance

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

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.

Beat Street

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Janet and Michael vs Molly and me

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

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.”

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