This is part of a research project I’m doing for my Psychology of Music class at NYU, thus the formal tone. The backbeat is a ubiquitous, almost defining feature of American popular and vernacular music. Clapping or snapping on the backbeats is generally considered by musicians to be more correct than doing so on the [...]
Filed in Dance, Music, Race and Identity, Science
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Also tagged africa, america, backbeat, dance, drumming, funk, hip-hop, jazz, neuroscience, nyu, race, rhythm, rock, swing, syncopation
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Quora user Andrew Stein asks: Musicians: How do you deal with playing songs that have very monotonous parts? I’m going to use James Brown’s Sex Machine as an example. Don’t get me wrong, I love the song. However, the rhythm guitar seems to be nothing but 2 chords played over and over and over with [...]
Filed in Music, Race and Identity
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Also tagged africa, classical, funk, groove, looping, meditation, Music, prince, quora, repetition
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Steven R. Livingstone, Ralf Muhlberger, Andrew R. Brown, and William F. Thompson. Changing Musical Emotion: A Computational Rule System for Modifying Score and Performance. Computer Music Journal, 34:1, pp. 41–64, Spring 2010. The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the [...]
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The bassline is neglected by most non-musicians. But if you want to write or produce music, you quickly find out how important it is. The bassline is the foundation of the whole musical structure, both rhythmically and harmonically. The best basslines interlock with the drums and other rhythm instruments to propel the groove, without you [...]
Filed in Composition, Dance, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged 808, art blakey, bass, beatles, black sheep, bootsy collins, charles mingus, daft punk, dance, digable planets, duke ellington, electronica, funk, groove, herbie hancock, hip-hop, janet jackson, jazz, john coltrane, kanye west, ladysmith black mambazo, looping, michael jackson, miles davis, morphine, paul simon, pop, rock, sequencing, talking heads, teddy riley
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Saturday, February 26, 2011
This week I’ve been all about Kanye West’s “Lost In The World,” the most gripping track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye is one of the few commercial producers with a high enough profile to be able to license whatever samples he wants, so he carries the banner of memetastic collage-based music in the [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged autotune, bon iver, chipmunking, gil scott-heron, jamie foxx, kanye west, lyn collins, manu dibango, michael jackson, Sampling, singing
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Saturday, February 12, 2011
I’ve read that Quincy Jones carries around copies of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue in his briefcase, and that he hands them out to kids whenever he meets them. Q-Tip compares Kind Of Blue to the Bible — you’re just expected to have a copy around the house. If you’ve never heard jazz before, Kind [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Theory, Sampling
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Also tagged ahmad jamal, classical, debussy, erykah badu, gil evans, jazz, john coltrane, mashups, mccoy tyner, memes, miles davis, morton gould, Music Theory, public enemy, Sampling, the heavy
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Saturday, October 9, 2010
The internet is home to a lot of questionably legal breakbeat collections like Drumaddikt and Cyberworm’s Sample Blog. “Cold Sweat” by James Brown is always included in these collections. It’s beloved equally by hip-hop and drum n bass producers. The break is at 4:30. There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and [...]
Thursday, September 30, 2010
In 1987 I remember having my ears grabbed by this thing on the radio called “Pump Up The Volume” by MARRS. Now that mashups are so common, this track doesn’t sound particularly remarkable. But in seventh grade it was startling to hear a house music track full of random samples. “Pump Up The Volume” was [...]
Filed in Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged authenticity, bobby byrd, digging the crates, dj hero, eagles, eighties, eric b & rakim, flow, fugees, hip-hop, jimi hendrix, marrs, mashups, nas, recursion, revival revival, sample maps, Sampling, stetsasonic, turntablism
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I wrote a general post about what makes a hot beat hot. As a followup, here’s how to program some generic patterns and a few famous breakbeats. The basic unit of dance music is a sequence of sixteen eighth notes, two measures of four-four time. Drum machines like the Roland TR-808 represent the sixteen eighth [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged dance, drum machines, drumming, funky drummer, hip-hop, hone, honey drippers, led zeppelin, looping, programming, rhythm, rock, time
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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:
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Music, Music Business, Politics, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged a tribe called quest, audio editing, beastie boys, biz markie, clyde stubblefield, computers, copyright, dance, dj, eighties, george clinton, hip-hop, Improvisation, jeff chang, looping, mashups, memes, michael jackson, Music, pro tools, public enemy, Recording, remixes, rock, Sampling
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