The authors present CMERS, “a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the real-time control of musical emotion that modifies features at both the score level and the performance level.” The paper compares CMERS to other computer-based musical expressiveness algorithms, as part of a larger effort to find a complete systematic categorization of all of the emotions that can be expressed and evoked through music.

The authors first conducted a survey of past efforts to categorize emotions, and after meta-analysis of the results, devised a two-dimensional graph. The vertical axis runs from Active to Passive. The horizontal axis runs from Negative to Positive. The Negative/Active quadrant includes such emotions as anger and agitation. The Passive/Positive quadrant includes serenity and tenderness. The authors then paired particular musical devices with each emotion, both compositional and performative. For example, sadness is correlated with slow tempo, minor mode, low pitch height, complex harmony, legato articulation, soft dynamics, slow note onset, and so on.

Having established a rule set linking musical devices to emotions, the authors encoded the rules into a set of MIDI filters. These filters were used to generate computer performances with the desired emotional quality. The authors used computer rather than human performers because they wanted a ground base of perfectly flat affect, and very fine control over performative nuance. (A human performer in a good mood will find it difficult to convincingly convey despair, and vice versa.) Finally, the authors played the performances to students and asked them to locate their emotional response on the two-dimensional graph. They found very strong agreement between the intended emotion of a given piece and the students’ ability to identify that emotion.

I approach the authors’ entire effort with considerable skepticism. They have shown that within a given culture and narrowly-defined style, it is possible to identify broad-stroke relationships between particular musical devices and particular emotions. Within the goals they have set for themselves, they have succeeded quite admirably. But no unambiguous categorical system can possibly capture the bottomless complexity and nuance of emotion. A listener’s reaction to a piece of music will depend heavily on social context, personal history and education, and countless other intangibles. The state of the listener’s digestive tract is at least as important in determining their emotional responses as anything happening between their ears.

The authors focus their research on common-practice era Western classical music. This makes their task easier, since Western classical is centered around scores that easily translate into MIDI, and that follow a comparatively narrow rule set. The authors are conscious of this limitation and discuss applying their system to music of other cultures, with rule sets altered accordingly. But it is not necessary to look outside of America to find music whose features would defy ready emotional categorization. As I type this, I have James Brown in my headphones. He’s screaming in what at first blush sounds like rage and pain. Yet the overall result of hearing him is powerful emotional uplift. His music expresses conflicting emotions simultaneously: joy and anger, tenderness and aggression. That tension and complexity is the main appeal of James Brown’s music for me.

While I support efforts to find a deeper understanding of how music conveys and evokes emotion, I am not convinced that a reductionist approach ultimately contributes much of value. It would be better to embrace the full complexity, attempt to trace as many causal threads as possible, and be humble in the face of the ultimate impossibility of the task. For musicians, meanwhile, the best method for understanding how they can convey emotion to listeners is simply to practice and perform, to be attentive to the mood in the room, and to learn by experience.

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

Duke Ellington – “Half The Fun”

Paired with an incredible Sam Woodyard drum part. I love sampling it:

Nature Boy megamix by ethanhein

Duke Ellington – “Fleurette Africaine”

Charles Mingus’ strumming on the intro might be the most beautiful few bars he ever played. Hear a mashup I did of this tune and some other jazz classics:

Autumn Leaves by ethanhein

The Beatles – “Dear Prudence”

I could have chosen any of a dozen Beatles tunes here, I love those McCartney lines. But this one has the most emotional power for me. Here’s a blog post about it, and here’s a mashup I did of “Dear Prudence” with “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5:

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time”

From my favorite of Miles’ funk albums. Read a blog post about it.

James Brown – “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”

Pretty sure that’s Bootsy Collins playing bass, and he kills it.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”

Here’s a visualization I made of this loop.

Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”

Read more about this track, and check out the megamix:

Once In A Lifetime megamix by ethanhein

Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”

Of course.

Janet Jackson – “What Have You Done For Me Lately”

The song that made the Latelybass sound famous.

Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes”

Bakithi Kumalo on the fretless makes this tune for me.

Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”

Love those Teddy Riley sequenced lines.

Digable Planets – “Rebirth Of Slick”

The bassline is sampled from “Searchin’” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but the Digables flipped it into something new.

Black Sheep – “The Choice Is Yours”

Another creative flip of a jazz sample, from McCoy Tyner’s recording of “Impressions.”

Morphine – “Buena”

No embedding; click the image to hear the song:

Two-string slide bass and baritone sax!

Daft Punk – “Around The World”

Never get tired of this one.

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Kanye has been using tuned 808 kick drums to play his basslines lately, which is a dazzlingly hip idea. The kick and the bass are supposed to be in tight sync anyway; why not just fuse them into a single part? I know he’s a ridiculous human being in a lot of ways but the man knows how to put a track together.

Let me know if I missed anything critical, I’m sure I did.

Original post on Quora

There’s nothing going on in contemporary music that interests me more than the vibe of this track. The blend of electronic and tribal drums and Auto-tuned singing draws on the same sonic palette as “Love Lockdown,” which continues to be my favorite song of the 21st century, but “Lost In The World” is much bigger and denser.

Samples

The intro of “Lost In The World” is a long sample of Bon Iver’s “Woods.”

I don’t usually have a lot of patience for quavery-voiced indie folk, but I always enjoy an Auto-tuned a capella. Kanye was right to want to jump on it. “Woods” is a musical cousin of Imogen Heap’s “Hide And Seek” which I’m surprised that rappers haven’t taken more of an interest in sampling.

At this point there’s nothing too surprising about rapping over sampled singing, but I like this idea of layering tons of new sung vocals on top of samples. Aside from Bon Iver, the liner notes list Charlie Wilson, Kay Fox, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis singing or chanting. Their voices are layered and processed into an otherworldly thickness. It’s an arresting blend.

The album’s liner notes say that “Lost In The World” samples the famous beat from “Think” by Lyn Collins and the JBs — listen at 1:25. I can’t really hear it under all the other layers, but I’ll take Kanye’s word for it.

This song was most famously sampled in “It Takes Two” by DJ EZ Rock and Rob Base, but it appears in about nineteen thousand other tracks too.

The line “Who will survive in America” comes from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1.” I assume Kanye drew inspiration from the congas for his tribal drums too.

This has nothing to do with anything, but in the New Yorker profile of Mr. Scott-Heron I learned that he and I went to the same fancy private school. Small world.

The lyrics

When it comes to pop, the production usually outweighs the lyrics in substance by a hundred to one. “Lost In The World” is special, though, because through much of the song, different lyrics are being sung simultaneously. That’s some pretty hip stuff. Bon Iver’s sampled part goes:

I’m up in the woods
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a still
To slow down the time

When the rest of the vocalists enter, they sing:

I’m lost in the world
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a city
And I’m down for the night, down for the night

Says she’s down for the night

I’m never alone
Down the time

I’m lost in the world
I’m down my whole life
I’m new in the city
But I’m down for the night

Down for the night, down for the night

Then we come to Kanye’s actual verse, which, meh. It’s a mostly a string of simplistic cliches, though there is one pretty remarkable line:

You’re my stress and you’re my masseuse
Mama se, mama sa, mama coosa

First of all, very nice internal rhyme. Secondly, Michael Jackson fans will recognize the quote from the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which is itself a quote of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.”

What does it all mean?

In an essay in The Awl entitled “Understanding Kanye: Sweet, Sweet Robot Fantasy, Baby,” Mike Barthel describes Ye as turning himself (figuratively) into a robot.

Kanye had to fight to be taken seriously as a rapper, and he only succeeded once he started becoming a cyborg. A car accident in 2002 left him with a metal plate in his jaw, and instead of trying to cover up the unreal, he brought it to the fore, recording a song while and about how his jaw was still wired shut. The resulting single, “Through the Wire,” was his first hit, and the song that convinced Roc-A-Fella to give him an album deal. He had found beauty in a piece of machinery that would normally be hidden under a more believable imitation of the real. In so doing, he created a verbal analog of his most famous production technique, “Chipmunking,” in which a sample is sped up to match a faster beat and consequently raised in pitch as well. Chipmunking is a kind of joke about beatmaking; producers work to make a sample match their preferred tempo without changing pitch, but by exaggerating these seams, Kanye made the unnatural pleasing. He was learning the value of the mechanical in and of itself.

Anyone who traffics heavily in samples, as Kanye does, is going to confront the dissolving boundaries between “fake” manipulation of recordings and synths and “real” instruments and vocals. All hip-hop deals in that tension, and the best practitioners throw it in your face.

This influence of the mechanical floats in and out of his first two albums, though it fights with his natural tendencies toward the natural. You can hear the tension on “Slow Jamz,” a prime chipmunking track, when Kanye contrasts the unnatural speed and pitch of Luther Vandross with the biological abilities of Twista, someone able to imitate the hyperspeed feel of digital sound manipulation with natural verbal techniques.

When the other guest on “Slow Jamz,” Jamie Foxx, pops up on the second album’s “Gold Digger,” it’s to do the same convincing imitation of Ray Charles that he did in the movies. But after Foxx’s intro, we get the real Ray Charles, or maybe the “real” Ray Charles, since it’s a recording of a live performance that’s been cut up and rearranged. Foxx’s intro is a sort of signal to us that there’s more going on here than just sampling, but once you’re into the track, it’s easy to lose those issues given how closely the use of Charles’ “I Got a Woman” hews to rap conventions for sample use.

This idea of putting a real recording of fake Ray Charles up against a “fake” sample of real Ray Charles: very hip stuff.

It seems almost unkind to point this out, but between “Late Registration” and “Graduation” Kanye’s mother died after complications from plastic surgery. Technology had always served Kanye well before—in the form of his producer’s tools, it was the vehicle that took him from obscurity to the cusp of stardom—but now his mother’s own cybernetic changes had ended in death. The mechanical had turned on him.

The video for “Stronger” shows Kanye’s heart being surgically removed before he goes on an Akira rampage. Not too hard to figure out the emotional intent there. But the song is still a brag: “That that that that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.”

My friends are about evenly split on the album that follows, 808s And Heartbreak. I come down strongly in favor. The tension between organic and inorganic reaches a new pitch. On the one hand, there’s the pervasive Auto-tune and the clinical drum machines and synths. On the other hand, Kanye is liberated by the automated pitch correction to emotionally go for broke in his singing, knowing that anything he puts down will come out sounding musical. Mike Barthel shares my love for 808s And Heartbreak.

When he premiered his first track from the album, at the 2008 VMAs, the spot on his chest that was covered in bandages in the “Stronger” video was now filled. But instead of a real heart, he had a digital one, a pin made up of red LEDs blinking on and off, a crack running down the middle. The operation had been, at least on its own terms, a success. Kanye was now a full-fledged cyborg. On “Love Lockdown,” his voice was filtered through AutoTune with a sharp attack and a subtle bit of distortion to produce the sound of a human trapped, maybe unwillingly, inside a robot. The same effect was applied to almost all the vocals on the album, and while it was deliberately artificial, it was also, like he had said, stronger: where before he could only rap, now he could sing. The off-key caterwauling of “Drunk and Hot Girls” was now a precise tone full of a kind of electric soul. It wasn’t the raw emotion of humans, but the synthesis of emotional impulses and mechanical restraint, a computer’s inauthentic attempts at automatic expression which nevertheless sprung from a real human need to communicate.

And that brings us to the present. Kanye has all the money and fame and power a human being could ask for, but he’s still lost in the world. The alienation and self-doubt comes across loud and clear. But the power and confidence does too — all those singers, all those tribal drums, the angry defiance. This is a surprisingly challenging and avant-garde track for a supposed pop hip-hop album, a wall of sound spaced with yawning silences in pure digital black. If Kanye keeps putting out music like this, he can be as big a public nuisance as he wants.

Gil Evans wrote the abstract intro section, partially inspired by “Voiles” by Debussy. The tune proper begins at 0:34. If you want to learn how to improvise jazz, you should definitely learn Miles’ solo. A guy named Steve Khan posted this nice transcription of it, but you’re better off figuring it by ear. Learn to sing it first, and then work it out on your instrument. Miles’ solo isn’t too challenging technically, and it can teach you a ton about melody, phrasing and build.

Here’s a live television performance of “So What.”

“So What” is famous for being one of the first modal jazz tunes. This just means that it doesn’t have a lot of chord changes compared to the usual harmonic density of bebop. Because “So What” is relatively easy to play, it’s a standard piece for beginners and high school jazz bands. The main part uses the D dorian scale, the mode you get when you play the C major scale from D to D. This scale is especially easy on the piano — just play the white keys. To play the bridge, you slide up a half step to E flat dorian.

The So What riff

The melody of “So What” is a call in the bass followed by a response from the piano and horns. The response part of the melody is known as the So What riff. It’s a pair of minor seventh chords, one a whole step above the root, the other on the root, played in the particular rhythm shown above. Miles Davis didn’t invent the riff. It’s a jazz accompaniment cliche, widely used by pianists, guitarists and horn section arrangers. Miles just had the wisdom to pluck it from the memepool and place it front and center in a tune. The riff is built on the So What chord: a stack of fourths with a third on top. The fourths make the chord sound ambiguous and open-ended. It’s a hip sound, and in fact you can use the So What chord for a variety of harmonic purposes, not just minor sevenths. It’s an especially useful voicing for guitarists, since it’s really easy to play and sounds good in so many different situations.

“So What” and “Impressions”

Casual music fans use the term “sampling” to mean any kind of musical quotation, interpolation or reference, not just digital manipulation of audio recordings. I think they’re correct to conflate all these different practices, since they all stem from the same desire to repurpose existing ideas in new context. In the broader sense of the term, “So What” has been sampled extensively. Most famously, John Coltrane, the tenor sax player on the original recording of “So What,” used its chord changes for his own classic tune, “Impressions.”

“Impressions” is more of a mashup, really, since its melody is sampled from Morton Gould’s composition “Pavane” — listen at 1:28.

Coltrane probably learned this composition from Ahmad Jamal, who recorded a popular  arrangement of it in 1955. Miles Davis was a big Ahmad Jamal fan too, and is said to have drawn inspiration from this passage’s harmonic setting for “So What.” Lewis Porter says that Coltrane got the B section for “Impressions” from Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.” This piece was also the basis for a 1930s standard, “The Lamp Is Low.”

How’s this for a sample chain? McCoy Tyner was Coltrane’s pianist on “Impressions.” Later McCoy recorded his own version of “Impressions.” A piece of the bass solo from this recording was sampled by Black Sheep in their classic track “The Choice Is Yours.” The memes do get around, don’t they?

Coltrane and his bandmates got a lot of mileage out of the So What riff, both in their writing and improvisation. Hear the riff at work in “Song of the Underground Railroad.”

The So What riff in funk, soul and R&B

Pee Wee Ellis, the trombonist and arranger for James Brown, says that he unconsciously copied “So What” when he wrote the horn part for “Cold Sweat.” It’s fitting, then, that “Cold Sweat” has itself been sampled many times.

The inspiration flows both ways. Miles loved James Brown and imitated him explicitly during his funk period. For example, Miles instructed Tony Williams to play the “Cold Sweat” beat on “Frelon Brun.”

And now, here’s where it gets really convoluted. One of the many songs sampling “Cold Sweat” is “Welcome To The Terrordome” by Public Enemy. The track also includes a sample of James Brown’s “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose.” Miles actually sampled that same beat himself, on his late-period tune “Blow.”

The So What riff also shows up in the horn line from “Let a Woman Be a Woman And A Man Be A Man” by Dyke and the Blazers. This is another tune that’s been sampled extensively, most prominently in “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy, as heard in tons of TV commercials.

The Heavy’s usage of the Dyke and the Blazers sample has been the subject of intense litigation, which I think is funny, because Dyke and the Blazers copied their tune almost note-for-note from James Brown. The irony of the situation merits a full blog post of its own.

More recently, Erykah Badu repurposed “So What” for her live version of “Rimshot.”

Teena Marie makes similar use of “So What” in her tune “Harlem Blues.”

For all of the influence “So What” has had, I’m surprised to find that there are hardly any hip-hop tracks that sample it directly. Maybe it’s too sacred even for hip-hop producers. If you can think of a good example, hit the comments. Meanwhile, here’s a diagram of all the songs mentioned above.

Hear a mashup of many of the tracks discussed in this post:

So What megamix by ethanhein

Other Miles Davis samples

Busta Rhymes‘ “Everything Remains Raw” gets its moody chord progression from the ending of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” It’s not on YouTube, sadly, but it’s worth chasing down, it’s a beauty. OutKast uses Miles’ trumpet scream from “Sivad” on “Ain’t No Thang.” See a map of many more Miles Davis samples. And read all about how Miles remixed himself on the album In A Silent Way.

Doing this kind of genealogical tracing of music has convinced me that ultimately, there is no originality. There’s just the splicing together and hybridizing of memes. Some people find this realization dismaying. I find it exciting. I enjoy tracing the lineage of the music I care about. Hope you’re enjoying it too.

There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and diced this beat without having heard the actual song. I’m sure the same is true of “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache.” Beyond the break, “Cold Sweat” is a remarkable piece of music, way out ahead of its time. On James Brown’s album of the same name, it’s sitting alongside jazz standards like “Nature Boy” and some boilerplate blues and R&B. Compared to those more traditional songs, “Cold Sweat” sounds like it belongs in another era entirely. It has a radically simple two-chord structure and an African-influenced intricacy to its rhythmic groove, and it still sounds pretty fresh more than thirty years later.

“Cold Sweat” was written by the Famous Flames’ bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, seeded by a bassline James Brown came up with vocally. Ellis says he got his horn line from “So What” by Miles Davis, which has been the basis for many other tunes as well. Hear a mashup of “Cold Sweat” with “So What” and other related tunes.

So What megamix by ethanhein

As befits a song based on a musical quotation, “Cold Sweat” has been sampled widely. Here’s a sample map; click to see it bigger.

“Cold Sweat” has been a particularly rich source of inspiration for Public Enemy — they sample it on “How to Kill a Radio Consultant,” “Prophets of Rage” and “Welcome To The Terrordome.”

“Welcome To The Terrordome” is an unusually dense web of samples, even by Public Enemy standards. It includes several other James Brown samples, including “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose,” “Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved” and “Soul Power.” And “Welcome To The Terrordome” has itself been sampled and quoted many times, by KRS-One, Non Phixion and Ice Cube, among others.

“Cold Sweat” is so influential that Mongo Santamaria’s cover version spawned a hot breakbeat of its own. It’s at 2:21.

RJD2, composer of the Mad Men theme song, uses Mongo Santamaria’s beat in “The Chicken-Bone Circuit.”

Ultramagnetic MCs love “Cold Sweat” almost as much as Public Enemy. They use the James Brown version on “Kool Keith Housing Things.”

And they use the Mongo Santamaria version in “Feelin’ It.”

Finally, I myself use the Cold Sweat break in the first track from my forthcoming Delia Derbyshire remix project.

Planetarium Remix

Me vs James Brown vs Delia Derbyshire vs Babsy Singer

mp3 download, ipod format download

Here’s how to program the Cold Sweat break on a drum machine. Give the drummer some!

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 part of the same UK dance music movement that spawned the KLF’s “Doctorin’ The Tardis” and “Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite. I wasn’t enough of a hip-hop head in 1987 to recognize where the phrase in the title comes from, but now I do, it’s from “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B and Rakim. Listen at 0:43:

It makes sense that I first encountered Rakim Allah in the context of a sample, because he and Eric B pretty much wrote the book on sample-based music. “I Know You Got Soul” is named for the Bobby Byrd song, written and produced by James Brown, that you hear looped throughout the track. Sampling James Brown has become a basic part of the musical toolkit, but it wasn’t such an obvious choice back in 1987. Stetsasonic said it best in their song “Talkin’ All That Jazz:”

Tell the truth, James Brown was old
’til Eric and Ra came out with “I Got Soul.”

Now, thanks to eighties hip-hop, James Brown will be cool forever. Sample-based music is supposed to be “fake,” but paradoxically, sampling made funk authentic again after disco had turned it corny. Michael Krimper observes in his blog post Future Funk: Searching For The Lost Groove that by removing music from its original social context, sampling frees it to be heard and experienced in new and unexpected ways.

The aesthetics of the hip-hop beat — one of recycled recorded sounds and reinvented roles for samples clips repeated on loop — spawned a whole new social practice of archiving. A new culture of crate diggers, both collectors and enthusiasts, grew obsessed with finding and archiving dusty, lost vinyl from a previous generation… It’s almost as if these producers began, nearly 20 years later, where the previous musicians had left off. Those funk sounds, once dulled down by over-saturated commercial mediation, became fresh again and pregnant with a wave of creative potential. The early hip-hop generation didn’t grow up during the golden age of the funk era, but they listened and absorbed at home as children. They grew familiar with the sounds without enduring the same forces of marketing as their parents. Maybe that opened up enough free space for them to imagine the music differently.

Eric and Ra have a futuristic electronic sound based almost entirely on samples and turntable scratching, but its futurism is balanced by the rich network of associations they build in with their choice of sampled records. Here’s a map of all the samples on the album Paid In Full – click to see it bigger:

Fittingly, Eric B and Rakim have themselves been a rich source of samples for other artists, starting with Coldcut’s epic remix of “Paid In Full.” Eric and Ra themselves have sampled the songs on Paid In Full many times as well. The phrase “follow the leader” at 1:03 in “I Know You Got Soul” is the basis for, you guessed it, “Follow The Leader.”

Eric and Ra sample “Eric B Is President” in both “Eric B Never Scared” and “Move The Crowd.” This kind of extreme self-reference has been an inspiration for subsequent self-samplers, like Nas on “Nas Is Like” and Fugees on “The Score.” And by the way, “The Score” includes a sample of Eric and Ra’s “My Melody,” which heavily features a sample of itself. How’s that for recursion?

Eric and Ra also inspired the recording of mine that I’m most proud of. “Eric B Never Scared” samples “Those Shoes” by the Eagles. When it came time for my band Revival Revival to work up our arrangement of “Those Shoes” it seemed logical to work in a sample of “Eric B Never Scared.” This is easily the nastiest groove I’ve ever put together.

Revival Revival – Those Shoes Never Scared by ethanhein
I had a teenage guitar student who loves hip-hop, and he asked me for some recommendations. He was underwhelmed when I played him “Follow The Leader” — he thought it sounded old-fashioned and unsophisticated. I was shocked; what could be fresher than Eric B and Rakim? But I’m from a different generation. High school kids now were born into a world where hip-hop is a given. They take it for granted that artists like OutKast and Common and Lauryn Hill will pack their flows with dense internal rhymes and tumbling streams of imagery. Rakim doesn’t sound so groundbreaking now that every halfway decent emcee has absorbed his techniques. It’s like the way the radical innovations of Jimi Hendrix have been turned into standard rock cliches. It takes some historical context to imagine how stunning he must have been back in the sixties.

Rakim came by his connection to the musical past more personally than most, since he’s the nephew of the great R&B singer Ruth Brown. In an interview with Planet Ill, he talks about how his musical upbringing impacted his flow:

I think playing in the bands and learning how to read music; learning the theory of music breaks it down a little more and you get to understand it better. It helped me a lot with my rhythms and my syncopations… I played the sax in school. I play alto all the way up to baritone sax. Coming up in the house my older brother played piano, my middle brother older than me played saxophone, the drums.  I tried to get my hands on whatever I could.

You can clearly hear the bebop in Rakim’s deadpan delivery and his long chains of eighth notes, starting and ending on unexpected beats. His flat affect holds a lot more swagger than if he was yelling and screaming. It lets you focus on the complex musicality of the words. For the first couple of albums, he uses every single song to rap about how awesome he is at rapping, which he proves by being awesome at rapping, even when he’s just rapping about how awesome he is at rapping.

I’m a member of the first hip-hop-listening generation and I still hear Eric and Ra as hot. All that minimalism and repetition and empty space — I know plenty of musicians who are still catching up with it. The eighties hip-hop sound feels urgent to me, it’s so confident in itself. It becomes timeless by being so unapologetically of its time.

Some of the musicians I work with are very anxious about not being too fresh. There’s this need to imitate the masters of the past, to not stray too far from the territory marked out by the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or John Coltrane or whoever their idols may be. This results in weak music. How can you tell the truth about yourself when you’re too timid to belong to your own time and place? I want to grab any musician now who’s obsessed with sounding like Zeppelin, and ask: would you care about them if they were anxiously imitating the music of thirty or forty years before them? There were plenty of bands in 1975 who only played big band jazz, does anyone care about them now? Led Zeppelin took big risks in 1975. Now that their sound has become acceptable, there’s no risk in sounding like them, and no reward either. It’s 2010, better to play and write and produce like it’s 2010.

That doesn’t mean you have to forget or ignore the past. Far from it. Best to follow Eric and Ra’s example and study the past, incorporate it and transform it. The Biz Markie sampling lawsuit may have thrown a wet blanket onto sample-dense music as a commercial enterprise, but the artistic genie is out of the bottle. I, for one, plan to keep doing as much sampling as I can get away with.

Meanwhile, Eric and Ra continue to make their presence felt. The list of hip-hop and techno artists who sample or quote them is too long to go into, and it runs right up to the present. They’ve even crossed over into video game territory — DJ Hero lets you mash them up with MIA, Tears For Fears and David Axelrod.

Hear my mashup of “I Know You Got Soul” with “Pump Up The Volume” and “Follow The Leader.”

I Know You Got Soul Megamix by ethanhein

Software like Reason and Fruityloops have drum machine emulators that follow the look and feel of the 808. The loop cycles from slot number one across to the right. When it gets to slot sixteen it jumps back to one.

Here’s how you’d count the basic loop. Above is the standard music notation method of counting two bars of four-four time. Below is the drum machine representation, with the eighth notes numbered one through sixteen.

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |

The key to the patterns below:

• bd = bass drum or kick drum
• sn = snare drum
• hh = closed hi-hat
• oh = open hi-hat
• rd = ride cymbal
• – is an empty slot

Genre boilerplate

Generic rock

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- bd -- -- -- bd -- bd -- bd -- -- -- bd -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- |

Generic hip-hop

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- -- -- -- bd -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- hh -- |

Generic techno/house/dance “four on the floor”

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| -- -- hh -- -- -- hh -- -- -- hh -- -- -- hh -- |

Some famous breakbeats

The Funky Drummer

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- -- bd -- -- bd -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- sn -- sn -- sn sn -- -- sn |
| hh hh hh hh hh hh hh -- hh hh hh hh hh -- hh hh |
| -- -- -- -- -- -- -- oh -- -- -- -- -- oh -- -- |

Impeach The President

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- -- -- -- bd bd -- -- -- -- -- bd -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| hh -- hh -- hh -- hh hh hh -- -- -- hh -- hh -- |
| -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- oh -- -- -- -- -- |

When The Levee Breaks

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd bd -- -- -- -- -- bd -- -- bd bd -- -- -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- -- -- -- -- sn -- -- -- |
| oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- oh -- |

Cold Sweat

|  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  +  1  +  2  +  3  +  4  + |
| 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
| bd -- -- -- -- -- -- -- bd -- bd -- -- -- -- -- |
| -- -- -- -- sn -- -- sn -- -- -- -- sn -- -- sn |
| rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- rd -- |

Notice that all these beats have a kick on the downbeat of the first measure. When P-Funk sings that everything is on the one, this is what they mean. Notice also that all of these beats have loud snare hits on beat three of each measure. This beat is called the backbeat, and it’s the defining sound of American dance music across every genre.

Hip-hop styles usually leave the kick drum off the downbeat of the second measure, slot 9 on the drum machine. Instead, hip-hop beatmakers anticipate the second downbeat by placing the kick in slot 7 or 8. Sometimes they delay it by putting it in slot 10 or 11. Sometimes they omit it altogether.

The odd-numbered beats are called strong beats, and the even-numbered ones are weak beats. Putting drum hits on the weak beats is called syncopation, and syncopation makes things sound hip. Experiment, and use your ears.

If you have requests for more breakbeat transcriptions, hit me in the comments. Happy programming!

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.

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.

Here’s how the Funky Drummer loop looks in the Reason loop player and sequencer. The blue thing is the loop player itself, where you can add effects like filter sweeps and pitch shifting. Below, the sequencer shows eight repetitions of the loop, forming an eight-bar phrase, a metaloop.

Here’s the view inside one of the colored boxes in the sequencer, a single iteration of the loop.

Each red brick is a slice, a rhythmic event, a drum or cymbal hit. There are sixteen of them in this loop. Reason follows the dance music convention of thinking of a bar as sixteen sixteenth notes, so it considers the Funky Drummer loop to be one bar long. This convention makes me crazy; I prefer to think of it as two bars of eight eighth notes each. However you want to count it, musicians usually describe this as a sixteenth note feel. Hear the loop:

By removing every other slice of the loop, you change the groove from a sixteenth note feel to a more spacious eighth note feel. The silences have as much presence as the drum hits.

Here’s how the loop sounds in eighth notes.

You don’t need to play the slices of a loop in their original order. Reason lets you play the slices in any order at all. Here’s the Funky Drummer loop completely randomized:

I’m not posting an mp3 of this because it sounds terrible, but sometimes randomizing the slices of a sample can give unexpectedly delightful results. You get especially interesting sounds when you map the MIDI data from one loop to the audio from a different one. You can also try new combinations by playing the slices from a keyboard or other MIDI controller. The slices automatically map to the chromatic scale, so slice one is the lowest C on the keyboard, slice two is C sharp, slice three is D and so on.

The loop player gets even more interesting when you supply it with a melodic phrase. By playing pieces of the melody in different orders and shifting the individual notes up and down, you can effortlessly create new melodies from any existing sample. The combinatorial possibilities are dizzying.

I see a strong analogy between shuffling the pieces of a sample to create new music and shuffling DNA letters to create new organisms. In biological evolution, all new organisms come about by the semi-accidental reshuffling of existing organisms’ genomes. So, for instance, mutations can happen when a sequence of DNA gets repeated accidentally during copying:

I believe that new music comes about this way too. Before software like Reason and Recycle, the reshuffling of musical memes happened exclusively in musicians’ minds, or later on paper. The software extends the power of our recombinational imaginations to recorded music, not just imaginary music. Powerful stuff!

Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? Here’s the Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s version, the sample will jump right out at you twenty-five seconds in.

Although “Bitter Sweet Melody” was written by Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, its publishing rights are held by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. This bit of legal absurdity is due to the Rolling Stones’ manager Allen Klein, who also holds many of the band’s earlier copyrights. Klein successfully sued The Verve for plagiarizing “Bitter Sweet Symphony” from “The Last Time.”

The Verve had legally licensed the Andrew Oldham Orchestra sample, but once their song became a hit, Klein challenged the terms of the license in court. His legal argument was that the Verve had used too much of the sample to be able to claim any authorship over “Bitter Sweet Symphony” at all. The Verve didn’t think they’d win the case and didn’t have the resources to pursue it. They agreed to a court settlement that gave the song’s publishing rights to Allen Klein’s company and songwriting credits to Jagger and Richards.

This case was tried in the UK, not America. Still, if the Biz Markie lawsuit and others like it are any indication, our courts would have probably produced a similar outcome. This is lame. The US Constitution says that the point of copyright is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” If you think, like I do, that sample-based music is a useful Art, then copyright law as it’s presently interpreted is not doing its job. Allen Klein didn’t contribute creatively to the Stones’ original song, the orchestral arrangement or the Verve song. He has nevertheless managed to collect a lot of the money all three recordings have made over the years. The Stones and The Verve get performance royalties for their songs, respectively, but when their songs get used in movies or video games or commercials, they get bupkes.

US copyright law says that works based or derived from another copyrighted work is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work. The problem with this statement is that all new works are derivative. All creative thinking consists of adapting existing ideas, especially in music. Nevertheless, the law says that if you write or record a song based on an existing copyrighted song, you need the copyright owner’s permission. Same if you write a story or shoot a movie using settings or characters from an existing copyrighted story or movie. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said in Feist Publications Inc v Rural Telephone Service Company that “copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work… It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.” O’Connor thinks that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality”, but as Wikipedia observes, the standard for creativity is not completely based on a work’s novelty. A work needs only a “spark” or “minimal degree” of originality. I’d say that The Verve’s song has more than enough of that spark to meet the standard of an original work.

The fragment of orchestral melody the Verve used for their song is totally unrecognizable as having any connection to the Rolling Stones, unless you know its history. There is a connection, a family lineage, but the Verve can’t reasonably be accused of having stolen anything. The sample is from a melody written by Andrew Oldham that sets up the Rolling Stones’ melody, but is distinct from it. If the Verve had had the foresight to hire a bunch of violinists and percussionists to play an identical snatch of music, the Stones would have no claim whatsoever.

Another irony is that the “original” Stones song is hardly original. Keith Richards freely admits that he borrowed the idea for “The Last Time” from a 1955 Staple Singers record.

This is nothing against the Stones. The Staple Singers were adapting a traditional song that has been widely replicated throughout the gospel world. Plenty of other musicians have derived new original works from the Last Time meme, the idea of a vocalist running out of patience for someone over a rhythm and blues setting. For example, James Brown recorded a song in 1964 called “Maybe The Last Time.”

To compound the ironies, Klein’s claim of 100% of the publishing of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” crowds other would-be stakeholders. The beat sampled in the song comes from “Doggone By Love” by George Suranovich, but he has no share in the song; he clearly doesn’t have the same legal acumen that Klein does.

The Verve’s song is arguably a lot more original than the Stones’, but because of the peculiarities of modern copyright, they’ve been screwed out of a lot of the money. Richard Ashcroft’s lyrics take on a dark irony given how the life of his song played out: “You’re a slave to money, then you die.” Klein licensed “Bitter Sweet Symphony” to Nike, Opel and Vauxhall for TV commercials against The Verve’s wishes, and Richard Ashcroft didn’t get a dime. Same thing when the song is used in video games, movies and TV shows.

Musicians mostly continue to disregard the law when it impedes their creativity. “Bitter Sweet Melody” has been covered, sampled and repurposed endlessly. Michael Jackson fans make tribute videos set to it. Kanye West and Wale rap over it, and it’s been sampled and interpolated for tons of techno and dance tracks, for example this one by David May.

Hear a mashup of most of the tracks referenced above.

Bittersweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Update: this post was used in a Williams College English course called Borrowing and Stealing: Originality in Literature and Culture. It followed a discussion of Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel and Pope’s An Essay On Criticism. Thanks, Professor McWeeny!