The app combines randomness and control in an intriguing way. I also like the fine microtonal control it gives you. You can also use it as a MIDI controller for other software, though I haven’t given that a try yet. If you want to try it for yourself and you don’t have an iOS or Android device, you can snag the desktop version, for free no less.

Aside from Nodebeat, the best three iOS music apps I’ve tried are:

• Animoog — a faithful reproduction of a Moog analog synth. Fascinating, wonderful, versatile, but very complex and I haven’t even begun to plumb its depths.
• Figure — a very stripped-down version of Reason with a beautifully minimalist interface, a sense of humor and wonderful sounds. It also has some maddening shortcomings, however, like not being able to save or export your work (unless you hook up a cable to other recording software from your headphone jack.) Also, nice though the interface is, it would be good to be able to more directly edit your patterns. I presume (hope) they’ll be rolling out more of this kind of functionality in future versions.
• Soundrop — more of a toy than a musical instrument per se, but an excellent toy. If you like quasi-randomness in your music, this offers you tons of gratification. Free, well worth monkeying around with.

I haven’t tried some of the big name iOS music programs yet. I’m told Garageband is pretty great, and the Electribe looks pretty interesting. For the most part, the apps I’ve looked at are too limited to seem worth the while compared to serious software like Ableton, Pro Tools, Reason and so on. But I’m keeping an open mind. If you have recommendations, please put them in the comments.

Subotnick has an extremely friendly dog.

The studio is cluttered in the manner of a creative person with a lot of diverse interests and a disinclination to throw things out. The shelves are strewn with software manuals, thick classical scores, computer innards, Mac peripherals of many generations, video and audio tapes, Rodney Greenblat CD-ROMs, books, business papers, and even a module from a first-generation Buchla.

Professor Subotnick shares my love of Stephen Mithen’s book The Singing Neanderthals.

The centerpiece of the studio, the Mothership, is Subotnick’s Buchla 200e. He has it patched with a bewildering tangle of cables. He knows what everything does, more or less, but even after a semester of studying and practicing on a similar Buchla, I still find this patch to be fairly impenetrable.

Check out the retrofuturistic touch keyboard on the right. While the Buchla can be controlled by regular MIDI, Subotnick is much more interested in the Buchla’s continuous-touch controls, which can be mapped to any parameter on the synth. Note that the “keys” aren’t rectangular, they’re hexagons and parallelograms.

Subotnick doesn’t just generate live sounds on the Buchla. He also deploys pre-recorded samples. They’re recorded off the Buchla, but then processed much more extravagantly than is possible live. Subotnick likes to create intricate swoops and dives via simulated doppler effects. Lately he’s also taken to using looped samples of his breakout hit “Silver Apples Of The Moon,” mixing them in with everything else. He triggers his samples from a groovy handmade Livid Block. If you look closely you can see his handwritten markings.

All of the sampled sounds blend together seamlessly, since they all have that Buchla timbre. Live remixing on the fly! Pretty hip.

So here’s Subotnick in action. He’s manipulating some Buchla parameters from the touch keyboard with one hand, and has his other hand on a little bank of sliders and buttons controlling yet more parameters via MIDI. The whole scene reminds me of Doctor Who operating the TARDIS — many of Subotnck’s sounds have that BBC radiophonic workshop vibe, which adds to the impression.

Here Subotnick plays samples from the Livid Block. Some are short, punchy attacks, and others are long and trailing. He can combine any attack with any decay to produce a wider variety of different sounds than the grid of touchpads would normally make possible.

The other key piece of the setup is a Mac running Max For Live. Subotnick uses Live for a variety of purposes: he stores his samples there, records his voice on the fly to use as an envelope controller for the Buchla, deploys effects, routes signal in complex ways, and occasionally even plays “normal” software synths with a conventional MIDI keyboard.

Spatialization of sound is a major preoccupation for Subotnick, and he has a pretty sweet quadrophonic speaker array set up. He also has a mammoth subwoofer, which mercifully he didn’t switch on while we were there, as he prefers listening to stuff LOUD.

To get a sense of what this all sounds like, here’s a recent Subotnick performance:

Let me reiterate the complexity of this whole arrangement. All of the Ableton sounds (the samples, synths and effects) can be processed through the Buchla’s filters and gates. All of the Buchla sounds can be fed through Ableton’s myriad effects, and the audio channels can be endlessly duplicated with different processing on different copies. The possibilities are staggering. And as if this weren’t enough to make me want to step up my game, Subotnick also has an electronic piano in the room, that he uses to practice classical repertoire. For four hours a day. Humbling! I have a lot to learn.

Hear some of my Buchla/Ableton music:

Guitar Hero, Rock Band and games like them have done a wonderful service to non-musicians. The games give a good sense of what playing an instrument in a band is like. The interface is simplified, but the overall experience is qualitatively remarkably similar. The games also change their players’ listening habits. A non-musician friend told me that until he played through Beatles Rock Band as Paul McCartney, he had never paid attention to a song’s bassline. Now he hears all those familiar Beatles songs in a new and richer way, and generally has learned to listen like a musician.

There is one crucial difference between the games and real music-making, however, and that is the absence of improvisation. The player moves through the song like a train on a track, and the games penalize any variation from the prescribed notes. Not all real-life music is improvisational either, but there is usually some element of personal expressiveness. Not so in Guitar Hero. Mimicry is the only way to play.

Rosenstock recognizes this shortcoming, and has devised a game to try to address it. Working with students at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he developed iGotBand, an experimental video game that incorporates improvisation. The player interacts with an assortment of animated avatars. Each avatar presents a row of colored blocks, representing note sequences to be played on the game controller. By playing the avatar’s note sequence, the player can capture it as a fan. The goal is to collect the most fans. The player need not reproduce the note sequences exactly; they are free to use any rhythm and can interject notes of their choice.

Rosenstock’s game is an admirable attempt at incorporating improvisation into a music game, but he fails to address some basic problems. The improvisation in iGotGame has no bearing on the player’s success or failure, making it a nice but meaningless feature. Rosenstock readily admits this to be a problem, and discusses the challenges inherent in turning musical improvisation into a game.

Games and music share the verb “to play.” But in both domains, the word play has several distinct meanings. Rosenstock pithily equates play with freedom, and games with rules. He introduces the term paidia, meaning childlike play: spontaneous and unruly. The musical equivalent would be free jazz and other radical improvisational forms. By contrast, there is play as ludus: games with ordered rules, ranging from chess to basketball, along with nearly all video games. Here the analogy is to classical music, as well as more formally bound jazz styles like bebop. Ludus permits improvisation as well, but within much tighter constraints.

Like other music video games, iGotBand is an example of ludus. The improvisation aspect is a dash of paidia, but again, this aspect of the game has no bearing on the win condition. We can hardly blame Rosenstock for this shortcoming. How would one possibly devise an unambiguous system of rules for judging improvisation that meet the requirements of ludus?

Improvisation can certainly be done well or badly. I’m better at it than my beginner guitar students, and Thelonious Monk was enormously better at it than me. But how could you quantify what makes Monk better than me, and me better than my students? I doubt that such a quantification is possible, even in theory. Rosenstock makes a vague gesture in the direction of social networking as a solution, but this doesn’t address the problem. People on the internet would vote for whichever improvisation they preferred according to whatever inscrutable criteria we use to judge any creative work. There would still be no unambiguous win condition that would meet the expectation of a gamer. Improvisation might superficially resemble a game, but Rosenstock inadvertently demonstrates how fundamentally incompatible it is with a competitive set of rules.

A better direction for music games would be to remove the win condition entirely, and turn them into expressive media. The Guitar Hero interface could work well as a beginner-friendly production and composition tool. It could present familiar song forms like twelve-bar blues and some suggested riffs that the player could alter at will. The pioneering music game FreQuency included a mode where the player could remix the game’s song library. A further convergence between the gentle learning curve of the game world with the open-endedness of music software like Logic or Ableton Live would invite a great many people into making their own music, rather than just passively consuming it.

First of all, here’s the original version from Snow White.

Once you’ve got the tune in your head, listen to the Miles Davis recording.

The extended intro section uses a pedal point, which just means that bassist Paul Chambers plays the same note over and over. The pedal point creates a feeling of floating suspense. Drummer Jimmy Cobb plays gentle waltz time with his brushes: one-and-two-and-three-and, one-and-two-and-three-and. (Most jazz tunes are in four-four time, so each bar would be one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.) Pianist Wynton Kelly plays some improvised figures based mostly on arpeggios, broken-up chords.

At 0:40, Miles Davis enters, playing the melody on muted trumpet. Even though he interprets the tune’s timing very loosely and adds some ornaments of his own, you should have no trouble singing the words along with him. This section is called the head, and as is the case with a lot of jazz tunes, it’s thirty-two bars long. Here’s the chart, if you’re a music reader.

At 1:17, Miles begins his solo. Over the same thirty-two bar form of the original song, he improvises a new melody. He chooses his notes spontaneously, but not randomly — the solo has to make sense against the song’s chords as they go by. You can keep track of the form by continuing to sing the words. As you do, hear how Miles’ playing interacts with the original melody. Miles is famous for his dark and moody style, and for his unhurried pacing. He plays fewer notes than his virtuosic sidemen, using frequent silences. You can hear him going back and forth between a tuneful style that refers back to the melody and a more abstract approach, choosing notes that form patterns for their own sake, sometimes rubbing tensely against the chords.

Each pass through the form of the song is called a chorus. Miles plays three choruses — you can sing the words three times over his solo. At 2:26, Miles ends his second chorus with a funky repetitive riff on one note. At 3:05, the end of the third chorus, he reiterates this one-note riff and extends it, allowing it to spill over past the end of the form with a nonchalance that’s typical Miles.

At 3:11, there’s a more energetic feeling in the drums as Jimmy Cobb switches from the soft-sounding brushes to the louder and more percussive sticks, and Hank Mobley begins his tenor saxophone solo. While Hank is an excellent saxophonist, he doesn’t come off on this recording too well — he was new to Miles’ band, and didn’t yet have his feet under him. Also, his softer and more lyrical improvisational style sounds a little schmaltzy compared to Miles’ acidic tone. (In fairness, if you want to hear Hank at his best, check out his classic album Soul Station.) After two choruses, you can hear Hank pause awkwardly at around 4:18, not deliberately like Miles, but out of uncertainty as to what to play next. He finishes his solo lamely, with a banal concluding phrase. This kind of moment is a reminder that improvisation is an intrinsically risky undertaking. Any jazz soloist has to face to possibility of an unsatisfying improvisation, or even a complete trainwreck. The risk of failure (or incomplete success) is exactly what makes jazz the exciting art form that it is.

Next comes Wynton Kelly’s piano solo, at 4:26. As in his intro, Wynton plays a lot of arpeggios, short fragments that call and respond to each other. Wynton sounds a lot more relaxed and on his game than Hank Mobley, no surprise since he was a veteran Miles Davis sideman. Wynton gets a chorus and a half, and at 5:24, Miles takes over, restating the second half of the melody. Then there’s a short interlude, using the same pedal point as the intro. This reiteration of the head and intro mid-song is an unusual structural move. Miles is setting the stage for the tune’s dramatic climax, the entrance of John Coltrane.

A little back story is helpful here. Coltrane had played tenor sax in Miles’ regular group on and off through the second half of the 1950s. Together, the two of them created some of the best and most famous recordings in jazz history, including Round About Midnight, Milestones and Kind Of Blue. (Go buy them! You won’t regret it.) At the time of the “Prince” recording session, Coltrane had recently left Miles to lead his own staggeringly great band, but he happened to be visiting the studio that day, so Miles invited him to sit in.

What you’re hearing at 5:52 is Coltrane playing with zero preparation, just sight-reading the chord chart. That may sound impressive, but it’s actually pretty common for jazz recording sessions. What you should be impressed by is the effortless intensity and power of Coltrane’s improvisation. His solo gradually builds in complexity until by the start of the second chorus, he’s playing doubletime, cramming twice as many notes into each measure as the pulse of the tune would suggest. His lines twist and spiral with a complexity unmatched by anyone else in jazz at that time.

It isn’t just his technical ability that makes Coltrane great. Even at speed, his note choices all make emotional sense, and his lines have a rock-solid melodic structure to them. If you slow Coltrane’s solos down, they become quite tuneful, even catchy. It’s one thing to be able to throw a lot of notes around; it’s a lot more rare to have all those notes tell a compelling story. The “Prince” solo is just a taste of Coltrane’s firehose-like stream of brilliant ideas, cut short by his untimely death only six years later.

After a short interlude, Miles plays the head out, the final statement of the melody. Usually the head out is identical to the head, but in this case, Miles just plays the first half of it. Then there’s an outtro, much the same as the intro, a piano groove over the pedal point in the bass. Wynton Kelly plays more freely than he did on the intro, using darker and crunchier harmonies, probably inspired by Coltrane. Finally, the tune winds to a spontaneous close, by a hand signal or eye contact among the players. You can hear that Jimmy Cobb doesn’t quite land in the same spot as everyone else, he carries over a few extra beats. Then someone in the room makes a mysterious “pop” sound with their mouth, and the tune is over.

Most mainstream jazz recordings follow this same basic sequence of events, called the head-solos-head form. The band plays the melody, with or without an intro. Then different musicians play solos on the melody’s form and chord progression. Finally, the whole band plays the melody again and the tune ends. There are infinite variations on this basic structure. You can get a taste for them just by listening to different versions of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” which has been recorded many times by jazz musicians over the years. Miles himself was inspired by Dave Brubeck’s 1957 recording, which is faster and doesn’t have the moody pedal-point interludes.

I chose this example specifically because it’s a well-known song to most of you reading this. Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles’ repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as “Prince.” Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles’ intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards — Miles’ own compositions of the period, like “So What” and “All Blues,” are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.

If you want to listen to jazz now, you’re at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like “So What” than through standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions to references to songs that were popular sixty, seventy or even eighty years ago. It’s left to the listener to supply all the historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome. Happy listening.

Composition
Duke Ellington – “Concerto For Cootie”

Blues feeling
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – “Moanin’”

Romance
Count Basie – “Lil Darlin’”

Effortless virtuosity
Clifford Brown and Max Roach – “Joy Spring”

Reinterpreting pop music
Miles Davis – “Someday My Prince Will Come”

Funk
Herbie Hancock – “Fat Albert Rotunda”

Soul-searching and inner flight
John Coltrane – “Venus”

Original post on Quora

Miles Davis was at his wildest and most experimental in his forties. That decade of his life starts with the Miles Smiles band (Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams) and extends into his electric funk period. The music that he was playing at age 49 on Agharta and Pangaea is the most intense he ever made, though it’s not to everyone’s taste.

I saw Max Roach perform a couple of times when he was in his seventies, and he was tremendous. At one of the shows, he did an encore solo piece on just a hi-hat, and you wouldn’t believe how much music he got out of it.

Original post on Quora

The Facebook page lists about eleven billion examples of The Lick. Here are some of my favorites.

Miles Davis, “Two Bass Hit” — John Coltrane plays it at 1:15 and 1:39.

John Coltrane, “Impressions” — listen at 3:11.

Coltrane again, “On Green Dolphin Street,” at 1:32.

Freddie Hubbard playing “A Love Supreme” at a Coltrane tribute concert — 0:16.

Sonny Rollins on Miles Davis’ “It’s Only A Paper Moon” at 2:25.

Sonny Rollins, “John S” at 1:51.

Grant Green, “Nomad” — Bobby Hutcherson plays The Lick at 4:12, 4:46 and 4:53.

Charles Mingus, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” — Joe Gardner at 1:34.

The Lick doesn’t just belong to jazz. Stravinsky uses it in “The Fire Bird” — listen at 14:43.

The Lick is a pop and rock staple too. Player uses a variant of it in “Baby Come Back” — listen at 0:13.

Santana plays yet another variant in “Oye Como Va” — listen at 0:17.

Akon sings The Lick right at the beginning of “Just A Man.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of four versions of The Lick, all transposed to A minor for clarity.

These few variations on The Lick only hint at the richness of explosive diversity you can find on the Facebook page. The Lick is one of those musical memes, like the Amen break or the “Egyptian” melody, that can adapt itself to a seemingly limitless variety of circumstances. There’s a lot of debate on FB about whether a given phrase counts as The Lick or not, since many of the examples stretch the time or alter the pitches, or both. These debates are a lot like the ones biologists get into around taxonomic issues, whether a given fossil is a dinosaur or a bird. The Lick mutates and evolves exactly like a gene in a population of organisms. You can think of The Lick as being like a single gene that codes for a single protein, functioning as part of a larger musical genome, a tune or a solo.

We come down hard on artists who use cliches too much, and praise others for originality. But if iconoclastic musicians on the level of Coltrane use The Lick so heavily, how bad can cliches be? Too much originality is an obstacle to creating emotionally resonant music. Coltrane’s last albums were by far his most original — you’re not going to hear too many cliches on Ascension or Sun Ship. But I find those albums challenging at best, and most people find them unbearable. Coltrane’s best art is based on familiar materials — showtunes, folk music, the blues. The best art doesn’t avoid cliches; it owns them, personalizes them and transforms them. I say, long live The Lick.

First, the Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, featuring some of Eric Dolphy’s finest work.

This track was originally issued on Impressions, but it comes from the Vanguard recordings and is one of my favorite things in the universe:

The other Coltrane live album I nominate is his 1957 Carnegie Hall recording with Thelonious Monk. The sound quality is as crisp as any of their studio work and the performances are extraordinary.

Original post on Quora

You can build up your vocabulary by studying other people’s improvisation, especially by transcribing from recordings. Working out melodies by ear is another good way to build vocabulary — as you stumble around and try to determine which note comes next, you’re doing a lot of experiential learning.

Music theory is the improviser’s best friend. Knowing the relationship between scales and chords frees your imagination, opening up new musical areas for you to explore. When you’re up on stage playing a solo, it’s not like you’re explicitly thinking “okay, a D7 chord is coming up, so I need to play mixolydian.” But having that knowledge thoroughly mastered means that when you get on stage you’ll have a bunch of notes under your fingers that you know will sound good. It’s up to you whether you want to stay in safe territory or venture out into crazier sounds, but it helps to know where the safe territory is.

Original post on Quora

My preferred method the past few years is to record some improvisation over a beat, and then edit the high points together in the computer. I also like to take samples, slice them and see how far I can get rearranging and pitch-shifting them. With vocals, I like to sing wordlessly or scat nonsense syllables, and then fit lyrics to them later. I learned a lot of these methods from working with hip-hop and electronic dance-pop artists and they’ve done a lot to freshen up my writing, make me take chances, and not be too precious about my ideas. When I’m doing work for hire, of course, I have to follow to the client’s process, and that can be a drag, but I try to adapt to whatever the method is.

If you’re immersed deeply in music, ideas will just pop out of your head continually. He’s wise to carry a recording device with him at all times. Paul McCartney famously kept a tape recorder, notebook and guitar or piano in every room of the house. “Yesterday” came to him more or less fully formed in a dream, and when he woke up, he just rolled over and recorded it before it vanished. These sorts of bolts of inspiration don’t just come out of nowhere. You need to feed your brain a lot of raw material. Listening isn’t enough. You need to memorize and perform other people’s material, and play around with it. Try extending or dropping sections, try combining parts of different songs together, try altering a chord here or there. Your brain will take in all these chunks of music, digest them and recombine them while you go about your day (and apparently also while you sleep.) When something hits, you need to be ready for it.

What is the creative process like when writing a song?