Thursday, December 3, 2009
Boys And Dance Floors Revival Revival vs Janet Jackson mp3 download, ipod format download Right-click or option click the links to save the track to your computer. There are as many different ways of writing songs as there are songwriters. Barbara Singer and I have arrived at a good one, so I figured I’d share [...]
Filed in Autobio, Composition, Improvisation, Music, Recording, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged autotune, composing, janet jackson, looping, pro tools, production, reason, Recording, remixes, revival revival, Sampling, songwriting
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
If you’re in a band, chances are you feel like you’re supposed to be writing your own material. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales (should you, improbably, be selling albums.) Writing your own stuff isn’t just a financial consideration. The [...]
Filed in Autobio, Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged arrangement, big band, chet baker, copyright, count basie, duke ellington, frank sinatra, harmony, jay-z, jazz, john coltrane, lego, looping, memes, miles davis, modules, Music, Music Theory, my favorite things, originality, reharmonization, remixes, Sampling, swing, symmetry, the sound of music
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Turntablists use record players to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. The record player as musical instrument is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound [...]
Filed in Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged a tribe called quest, afrika bambaataa, apache, dj, dj premier, funky drummer, grand mixer dst, grandmaster flash, herbie hancock, hip-hop, looping, mashups, music notation, peter piper, rahzel, remixes, rhythm, rockit, run-dmc, Sampling, scratch, turntablism, visualization, wu-tang
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Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Today the Michael Jackson fan art I have on my mind (and on the iPod) is “Please Don’t Stop The Music,” sung by Rihanna and produced by a couple of Norwegian guys. It includes a sample of MJ singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” The sample includes both his quasi-Swahili chant and his unearthly woo-hoo. It [...]
Filed in Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged beatboxing, dance, digging the crates, eighties, fan art, funk, manu dibango, memes, michael jackson, pop, recursion, remixes, rihanna, Sampling, seventies, songwriting, soul, soul makossa
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See a followup post about female remixes of “A Milli” Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged america, anxiety, autotune, class, cole porter, comedy, computers, drum machines, Evolution, hip-hop, irony, kanye west, lil wayne, memes, michael jackson, minimalism, natalie portman, natural selection, Recording, recursion, remixes, Sampling, snl, Social Media, t-pain, white people
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This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller. Here’s a screenshot of the program that the [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged composing, electronica, hip-hop, interface, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, Sampling, sequencing, synths, Video Games
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“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads and Brian Eno is one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
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Also tagged attention, beatles, brian eno, david byrne, meditation, mixing, philosophy, Recording, recursion, reggae, remixes, sly and the family stone, talking heads, tape, tape editing, time
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It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
Filed in Dance, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Software, Video Games
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Also tagged dance, ddr, guitar hero, japan, jazz, king of the hill, miles davis, Music, music notation, Video Games, visualization
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My friend Leo told me that he always faces a conflict when shopping for jazz records. He wants to show love for working musicians by buying their newer recordings, but then, he could always just pick up another Miles Davis album and know it’s going to be ridiculously good. Probably my favorite Miles album out [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged audio editing, funk, jazz, miles davis, Music, Music Theory, Recording, recursion, remixes, seventies, sixties, tape editing
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Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most [...]
Filed in Composition, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged chameleon, computer science, computers, electronica, fractals, herbie hancock, james brown, looping, mandelbrot, Math, Music, music notation, programming, recursion, visualization
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