If you’re a guitarist, you may have noticed that it’s hard to get your instrument perfectly in tune. This is not your imagination. If you tune each string perfectly to the one next to it, the low E string will end up out of tune with the high E string. If you use an electronic [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged autotune, guitar, harmonics, harmony, Math, Music, Music Theory, tuning
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December is always a complex month for half-Jewish mutts like me. When pressured to self-identify, I usually just go with “Jewish” for the sake of simplicity, but this is in spite of not having being bar mitzvahed, not knowing any Hebrew, having only the vaguest idea what all the holidays and rituals mean, and having [...]
Filed in Autobio, Music, Music Theory, Race and Identity
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Also tagged Autobio, blues, dave tarras, judaica, klezmatics, klezmer, microtones, naftule brandwein, nyc, scales
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Saturday, November 6, 2010
I was doing a frivolous Google search for the Simpsons episode where Bart, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph form a boy band. They’re in the studio singing, and they sound terrible, until the producer pushes a huge button labeled “studio magic.” Then suddenly they sound like the Backstreet Boys. While I was digging through the Google [...]
Filed in Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged audio editing, beatles, composing, mark katz, Recording, repetition, simpsons, van halen, walter benjamin
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I’ve now had a couple of opportunities to play around with an iPad, and to surreptitiously watch other people use it. I have strong and mixed feelings. The touchscreen interface is pretty wonderful and I have no doubt that it’s going to send the mouse the way of the floppy disk. But the walled garden [...]
DJ Kool Herc describes “Apache” by The Incredible Bongo Band as the national anthem of hip-hop. “Apache” includes a famous drum and percussion break that has reliably put bodies on the dance floor through hip-hop’s prehistory:
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged apache, breakdancing, copyright, dance, digging the crates, dna, double dee and steinski, drum n bass, drumming, Evolution, funk, goldie, grandmaster flash, hip-hop, kool herc, mashups, memes, missy elliot, nas, pop, questlove, roots, Sampling, seventies
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The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is the perfect embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock. What makes John Bonham’s drums on this track so staggeringly heavy? Partially it’s his playing, and partially it’s the innovative production. Bonham’s performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse [...]
Filed in Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged bjork, blues, digging the crates, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, led zeppelin, Music, pitch shifting, pop, Recording, rock
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