I was only vaguely aware of Tribe back in the nineties. I knew them as the preferred hip-hop group for my white friends who were put off by the harder edges of Wu-Tang and the west coast gangsta rappers. I encountered “Scenario” and “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” at parties, and found them entertaining, but didn’t feel compelled to go any deeper.

More recently, when I got into hip-hop scholarship in earnest, I started listening to Tribe for real. I downloaded “Check The Rhime” and was floored by the production.

The beats hit hard and simple; the samples are mysterious without being inaccessible; and the frenetic chorus contrasts excitingly with the buttery-smooth verses.

As I’ve been digging into more Tribe songs, I’ve been consistently impressed by their level of musicality. The tracks are accessible and fun, but on close scrutiny they’re dense with ambitious ideas. I’m particularly fond of the six-bar loop in “Electric Relaxation.”

Anyone can use an unusual phrase length, but it takes real artistry to make it sound so smooth and natural.

As for the movie itself, I enjoyed it and learned a lot. Some longtime Tribe fans of my acquaintance complain that it focuses too much on the present and doesn’t spend enough time on Tribe’s prime back in the 90s. That’s a fair point, and I certainly wouldn’t mind having more context on hip-hop’s golden age. But I thought the movie did a great job digging into the complicated relationship between the members of Tribe. I agree with Rob Fields’ review:

By far the most moving core of the film is the peek that it offers inside the relationship between Jarobi and Phife. It’s rare to see examples on the screen of two black men who have such unconditional love for each other.

The movie confirms that Q-Tip is central force behind Tribe, both on the production side and in setting the overall tone. But the other guys must have brought something to the table, even if it was just peer pressure. Tip’s post-Tribe music has been, you know, fine, but there hasn’t been anything remotely like “Check The Rhime.” When he calls himself “the Abstract,” Tip isn’t kidding. Phife and the others seem to have kept Tip’s ideas more down to earth, which helped make them stronger. The conflict between Tip and Phife is as much a part of their story as their creative partnership. Here’s an interview with director Michael Rapaport if you want some background.

One of the high points in the movie is Tip talking about his late father. He talks about getting the beat for “Can I Kick It” from a Dr Lonnie Smith record that he associated with his dad.

I’ve heard other hip-hop artists talk about sampling their parents’ music as a way of connecting to the older generation while still forging a new sound with present-day relevance. I know a lot of lame instrument-playing musicians who imitate the music of their parents out of an anxiety that they might deviate too far from what’s musically acceptable. Taking samples and transforming them makes for a healthier relationship to your ancestors.

Speaking of samples, I heard “Bonita Applebaum” for the first time in the movie.

I was delighted to discover the source of the sitar sample in the Fugees’ version of “Killing Me Softly.” And where did Tribe get that sitar from in the first place? A totally ridiculous song by Rotary Connection called “Memory Band.”

The real art of sampling isn’t just finding some great song and repeating the hook; it’s finding a hook in a terrible song and using it to build a new great song. But here’s the crazy thing. The main groove under the verses in “Check The Rhime” comes from “Baby, This Love I Have” by Minnie Riperton. Guess who the female singer in Rotary Connection was?

Q-tip seems like the exact kind of crate-digging sample geek who would know about the Minnie Riperton connection. A man after my own heart.

The film was also my first exposure to the concept of the pause tape, which is how a lot of hip-hop producers got started back in the day. Before digital samplers became so cheap and accessible, pause tapes were the easiest way to create loops. You’d put your tape recorder on pause and cue up the record to just before the part you wanted to sample. When the downbeat of the sample started, you unpaused the tape, and paused it again when the sample ended. Then you cued the record back up to the same spot, and repeated, and repeated, and repeated. Here’s a video of the process.

Tribe’s influence on present-day music can be felt in unexpected ways. Check out this remix of “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” around the 0:35 mark.

That little phrase, slowed way down, became the basis for “A Milli” by Lil Wayne. Hear the process at work.

I hope this movie inspires more movies about golden-age hip-hop, and I hope they continue to dig into the nuts and bolts of the creative process. People hear so much hip-hop but know so little about where it comes from, what it means, what the connections are. That ignorance extends to many of the musicians I know. Keep the documentaries coming!

Sampling lets you actively engage your record collection, iTunes library, etc

The vast majority of my musical experience has been through listening to recordings, and the same is true of everyone I know. The real pleasure of music is participation, and historically recorded music hasn’t been participation-friendly. It was a humongous deal for me to discover that I can interact with my record collection beyond deciding which song to listen to when.

Sampling has some of the same satisfaction of learning how to sing songs I like, or how to play them on the guitar. As with learning songs the old-fashioned way, sampling lets me remake recordings to my own tastes. I’ve learned through extensive experimentation that what I really like is to hear the song’s major hooks repeated in groups of eight at a medium slow tempo over an 808 drum machine playing a hip-hop beat. Sampling helped me discover that, and it’s transformed my approach to my own compositions too.

Expediency leads to spontaneity

I know a lot of drummers. Some of them are world-class musicians. But they aren’t usually available to me. If I just want to try out ideas over a certain beat, the logistics are a big problem. I don’t have a drum kit in my apartment, and if I did, it would drive my neighbors crazy. Even if that weren’t a problem, I don’t have the right mics or acoustic environment to do a decent recording of live drums. Meanwhile, I have a hard drive full of the best drummers in recorded history in every conceivable style, with an essentially limitless selection of others a few mouse clicks away on the internet. How could I possibly pass up the opportunity to practice and write along with Clyde Stubblefield or Questlove or Max Roach?

It isn’t just beats that can inspire new tracks or compositions. A short instrumental passage, a vocal phrase, a fragment of speech, a sound effect or atmospheric sound — any of those things can inspire new work. The effortlessness and immediacy of sampling creates such a wealth of possibility that the challenge becomes choosing from among all the new ideas. This is a much nicer problem than sitting there thinking, “I wonder what Duke Ellington’s brass section would sound like over this part? I guess I’ll never know.”

People get bored, computers don’t

A great way to write songs is to set up the basic groove on a loop and then let it play continuously for a few hours while you hang out, eat lunch, fold your laundry or play video games. The best creative work is done by your unconscious mind, and your unconscious mind likes to work while your conscious mind is busy doing something relatively uninteresting. This reality is an awkward fit with the reality of collaborating with other humans. Even if I could have a band at my beck and call, it would be completely wrong to ask them to loop a phrase identically for hours while I hung out eating oranges and reading my email. Fortunately, the computer has no objection to this way of working.

Freedom from permission

I don’t just mean legal permission, though that’s a thorny set of challenges in and of itself. For a lot of would-be samplers, the major obstacle is a sense of moral guilt. Many of us feel guilty “stealing” someone else’s idea. I resisted sampling for years out of guilt.

It’s strange to have so much power over sound. If I want a human to play the Funky Drummer beat exactly at a certain tempo for a certain length of time, I need to convince them to do it. If I just want to loop the Funky Drummer beat in Recycle, the computer is always happy to oblige me.

Should sampling make me feel guilty?

What do I owe another musician by sampling them? Let’s assume I’m not making any money off my work, just giving away copies to my friends. Is it cool if I do this without the original performers’ consent? There would be no hip-hop or electronica at all if everyone was “properly” hesitant to use unauthorized samples. I do try to get permission when it’s reasonably possible. Many of my musician friends have volunteered the use of samples of themselves with the understanding that if I ever make money from something, they get a cut. Meanwhile, if it’s just for experimentation or teaching, I’m free to use the samples as I wish. In a perfect world, this is the relationship I’d have with every recording artist.

Some copyright holders are only too happy to license samples, it can be a great source of income. But some musicians don’t like having their ideas altered and manipulated beyond the bounds of their personal taste, no matter how money it might make them. The Beatles, for instance, have never cleared a sample and are unlikely to change their minds. Meanwhile, if I’m sitting alone in front of my computer and I find a little slice of Beatles music that sounds great as a loop, Paul McCartney and his lawyers are nowhere in sight. It’s nearly impossible to resist the pleasure of sampling all that incredible music, and with a few pieces of software and some free time, anyone can do it. I respect Paul McCartney’s body of work like few others, and I consider it the sincerest form of flattery to sample from him. It’s too bad Paul McCartney doesn’t see it that way.

Samples have their own sonic and musical quality

Even if I could conjure any combination of musicians and instruments at will and had round the clock access to a flawless recording environment, I’d still want to be able to use samples. There’s a difference between a person playing a particular phrase repeatedly and the playback of a recorded loop. Even if a musician wanted to play a loop the way a sampler does, people can’t help but introduce slight variations of attack, subtle tempo changes, and all the other little nuances of live performance. In some styles of music, constant nuance and variation is a good thing. But sometimes you want the hypnotic, trance-like effect you get from identical looping. Electronica and hip-hop derive a lot of attention-grabbing power from the startling gap in a looped pattern, and the satisfaction when the loop returns right on time.

It isn’t just the musical content of the sample that creates its personality. It’s the recording itself, the particular interaction of the microphone and preamp and mixing desk and tape or digital medium. The magic of the Funky Drummer loop isn’t just in its beat — it’s the tape hiss, the equalization, the compression and reverb. A drummer might be able to recreate the musical performance, but not the exact sound.

In addition to their intrinsic sonic qualities, samples can be sonically manipulated in ways that live instruments can’t. I can instantly alter the pitch of a sample, stretch it out, filter sweep it, or rearrange its components in a different order. For maximum gratification, I love to hear live musicians and looped samples combined together.

Hearing a familiar sound in an unfamiliar context is exciting

Some of the coolest songs repurpose recognizable hooks, or even entire choruses, in new contexts. This technique is a foundation of hip-hop songwriting. Here are two examples that I like.

Janet Jackson ft Joni Mitchell – “Got ‘Til It’s Gone”

SWV ft Michael Jackson – “Right Here”

Shared ideas create community

By sampling Joni Mitchell, Janet Jackson invites all the Joni Mitchell fans into the room (and invites herself into consideration by Joni Mitchell fans.) When SWV samples Michael Jackson, they shine some of that Michael Jackson energy through themselves and out on us.

Individual ownership of music is a historical aberration

Ownership of ideas is a recent historical phenomenon, preceded by uncountable centuries of oral tradition in the public domain. Other world cultures don’t necessarily share our preoccupation with ownership. Even in capitalist America, we default to oral tradition in our daily lives. We have an intuition that you’re supposed to share music you like with people you like. It’s one of the basic ways we establish social bonds with each other. This custom isn’t going anywhere, no matter what copyright law might say. Sampling lets you share recordings you love, placed into new contexts, making new statements, while still connecting back to the past. This is a powerful emotional tool, and using it becomes irresistible once you get a taste of using it.

Sampling undermines our magical thinking about originality

It’s been my experience that there are no truly original ideas, only remixes and mashups of existing ideas. The completely original song is a legal fiction. It’s a useful fiction for managing intellectual property, but it’s problematic when it comes up against the collage-like nature of actually composing and improvising. The belief that new ideas spring magically into being from the ether reminds me of the once widely-held belief in the spontaneous supernatural generation of life. Now we know that all life on Earth evolved from previous life. Our ideas evolve according to the same Darwinian dynamics as the brains that produce and host them.

Sampling makes for a healthy intellectual culture

New ideas are always inspired by repurposing existing ideas. Copyright is supposed to motivate new ideas, but, as it’s presently enforced, it can have the opposite effect. When Disney transforms public-domain works into exclusive properties, that jams up the flow of ideas that made their wealth possible in the first place. There needs to be a free flow of ideas if ideas are going to keep evolving.

If sampling is so great, how is everybody supposed to get paid?

Our current copyright model emerged in the era of expensive printing presses, record pressing plants and so on. If a book was the only way to get access to the thoughts in the book, and the vinyl record was the only way to get access to the sounds on the record, it made to treat copies as valuable properties in and of themselves. In the computer era, copying is so routine and effortless that it’s impossible to meaningfully regulate it. You copy files every time you load a program from your hard drive.

Good ideas may still be scarce, but digital copies of them aren’t and probably never will be again. There has yet to be a copy protection scheme for digital media that couldn’t be cracked by any reasonably bright thirteen-year-old. In an interview with The Guardian, Brian Eno says:

I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate — history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.

What is this something else? Live performance? I use a laptop and samples for that too.

So how should the creators of my samples get paid? How should they get paid for any of the copying that goes into remixed and mashed up works? How do artists get paid for any kind of idea that can be rendered digitally if copying is so easy?

The question of how to make people pay for digital copies voluntarily haunts every creative professional. Sci-fi author Charles Stross lays out the problems in an articulate blog post here. The comments are full of intriguing suggestions that have some applicability to music.

I’m attracted to a model where we pay creators up front using the Kickstarter method or something like it, and having the copies just disseminate like dandelion seeds to raise interest in the next project. Giving away hours of stuff on the internet has made a lot of money for artists as diverse as the Grateful Dead and Lil Wayne. The fans want to show love to the artists. Maybe more musicians will just start asking the fans to donate directly via their web sites.

For most of human history, music was supported by the same invisible gift economy as any kind of mundane daily practice, like recipes or childcare routines or methods for opening coconuts. I’d like to see the gift economy make a comeback in music. Musicians are like religious leaders. Maybe the funding model should be more like church, where the fans view paying for music as a tithe. I’m a perfect customer for this kind of model. I’ve been looking to music for deeper meaning since I was a kid. I fill it with the reverent belief that I might have put into the spiritual world if I were inclined that way.

If I’m going to invest faith in my music, I need to know it’s on the up and up. It’s like when you meet a person, you want to know their connections, their family and friends. Knowing the connections creates trust. I want and am willing to pay for richer metadata along with my music files. I want context and background. My wish is for more liberalized sampling that comes with an ethic of explicit attribution. I buy music based on the basis of its being sampled in hip-hop or R&B songs all the time. I bought “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites when I found out that it was sampled in Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love.” I’d happily open my wallet for more access to a song’s guts. I want remix-friendly stems and karaoke versions. I want super-detailed liner notes that show me the whole musical supply chain. If I pay for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” by Michael Jackson, I want to be shown a link to “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango. From there I’d like some context on makossa as a musical and dance form. I want seamless integration with Allmusic and Wikipedia and Amazon reviews and Whosampled and Youtube.

I want sampling to be legally easier because it would make music more participatory, and thus more fun and interesting

If I really like a song, I want a playable Rock Band or DJ Hero version. I want interactive MIDI lead sheets with the chords, the melody and the rhythms. I want the lyrics annotated so I can click through to see explanations of slang or literary allusions. I want to see production details: who played or programmed what parts, what gear they used, what software, what plugins. I want to be able to hear the tracks one at a time and remix them or mash them up with other stuff I like. It seems like all this should be possible in the age of digital music.

Making your own music is good and good for you

It’s been pointed out to me that if anybody can remix anything, it’ll result in a flood of crappy remixes. This is true. It’s also good and necessary. Amateur participation is about process, not product. The singing in most church choirs is pretty bad. Most amateur bands are pretty lame. It’s still fun and healthy to participate in church choirs and amateur bands. It’s good for you to play basketball whether you play like Michael Jordan or like me (badly.) It’s good to cook your own meals, even if you’re no Julia Child. And it’s good to make your own music.

We still need the masters to light the way, to discover best practices and teach them to the rest of us. But leaving the whole process to the masters cheats us all out of an essential social and emotional vitamin. If sampling is what’s giving the most joy out of the tools we have at our disposal, then people are going to keep doing it. I hope we can all work out a better deal with each other over the permissions and attributions.

Listen to that crowd. Lip-synching might be fake, but Michael’s audience knows they’re witnessing something real. The band in the back is just sitting there, since all the music is pre-recorded. But they’re feeling it, you can see dudes clapping. What makes this music, even though no one is singing or playing any instruments?

Michael is pretending to sing a song that he did sing for real, on the recording. The recording is the platonic ideal of the “Billie Jean” vocal. Michael sang it for real, probably live from top to bottom as was his usual method. But that take was selected out of who knows how many, and who knows how many tape edits and punch-ins were performed. The vocal was recorded on the most expensive microphone through the most expensive mixing desk by the most expensive engineer in the most expensive studio. There would be no possible way to have a live vocal sound like that. By playing back the platonically ideal vocal and lip-synching to it, Michael is free to commit his attention to the rest of his delivery: his facial expression, his gaze, his body language, and of course, the famous choreography.

Lil Wayne closes shows by jokily lip-synching to Whitney Houston singing “I Will Always Love You” which I wish I had thought of first and have every intention of imitating next time I get to plan a live show.

Musical purists do not generally approve of lip-synching. There was a while there when I considered it to be cheating. But now I feel like, if the performer is telling the truth and is committed, that’s all the realness I need. The problem with a lesser artist like Ashlee Simpson isn’t the fact of her lip-synching. The problem is that she’s doing it with less than total commitment, accompanied by uninteresting choreography to a lame track. It’s still music, just not good music like Michael Jackson’s.

Cursory googling turned up a freestyle by Lil Mama, she of “Lip Gloss” fame. Also not what I was after but still cool.

Then I was busy with family and travel and am only now getting back to the search. Bangladesh, one of the producers of the “A Milli” beat, lists some of his favorite remixes and freestyles. Nice little sidebar but no solution.

The answer turned out to be Beyonce’s “Diva.” It’s not Beyonce’s best work but the production is happening.

The vocal sample “A Milli” is named for comes from “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (Vampire Mix),” a Tribe Called Quest remix by Fatboy Slim. Hear the original sample compared to how it appears in “A Milli”:

The Tribe Called Quest song has a bunch of samples in it, of Average White Band and Minnie Riperton and Grover Washington Jr and the Steve Miller Band. That makes “A Milli” a remix of a remix of a remix. Each subsequent remix deepens the layers of recursion.

What do you say, internet? Any more good “A Milli” treatments I should be aware of? Hit me in the comments.

And yet, I like Kanye’s music better than just about anything that anyone is making, and I like it up there with the best stuff ever made by anyone.

There are a lot of other musicians whose work I enjoy whose personalities are/were difficult. Miles Davis was said to be a challenging person. You wouldn’t have wanted to be married to Jerry Garcia. Charles Mingus wasn’t exactly Mister Personality; neither was Beethoven. In the age of recorded music, I find it easy to compartmentalize. Maybe I wouldn’t like Miles Davis’ or Charles Mingus’ albums so much if I had known them personally, but I didn’t, so I’m free to love those albums without reservation. So it is with Kanye. Whatever I think of his personality, I can’t get enough of his music, especially the stuff he sings on.

There’s a lot of pain in Kanye’s music, especially since the death of his mother from complications of cosmetic surgery. His mood got even darker when he broke off his engagement with his fiance a few months later. Kanye has taken the counterintuitive approach of making his music more pop-oriented and melodic as a way of expressing his anguish. His recent stuff has mostly been lush dance-pop of the Michael Jackson school. But it’s been a long time since Thriller. Kanye’s singing and subject matter are a step or three angrier and less polite. The combination of angry singing and blunt language filtered through seamlessly perfect digital production scratches me exactly where I itch. I like pain in music, but I don’t like it when the pain manifests itself as annoying, inaccessible sounds. I get plenty of boredom and anxiety in my actual life, I don’t need to seek out more of it. I prefer when unhappy musicians make attractive music you can dance to.

Kanye was motivated to sing a whole album with Auto-tune by his collaborations with and admiration for T-Pain. As T-Pain spurred Kanye to plunge all the way into robosinging, so both of them have motivated me to try it on everything too. Singing is one of the most basic, universal human bodily pleasures, but an introverted guy like me doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to do it aside from the shower. I don’t go to church, I don’t go to sports games, I don’t find myself in group singing situations generally. I have to go out of my way to make social singing happen by having bands and recording projects.

The problem with having music-making be a specialized and rigorous craft is that it makes normal people too anxious to participate. Why would you want to listen to me sing if any of the dozens of excellent singers I know could do it better? Why would you want to listen to any of us sing a jazz standard when there’s Billie Holiday? Why would you listen to me sing rock when there’s Mick Jagger?

Auto-tune is emboldening. It encourages risk-taking and truth-telling. By guaranteeing that everything you sing will at least be tolerable to listen to, you’re free to push boundaries in other areas. You can explore guttural, harsh sounds without being offputting and annoying. My favorite vocal performances of the past year have been by non-singers: Kanye, and also Lil Wayne. His duet with Kanye on “See You in My Nightmares” from 808s And Heartbreak is the high point of the album for me.

Some musicians like where Kanye is headed as much as I do. In an interview on MTV, Common said:

I love it. Let me tell you, as an artist, you wanna be free. You gotta do what you feel. You can’t just cater to the audience. You gotta say, ‘Hey, y’all, this is where I’m at.’ For him to do an album called 808s and Heartbreak, you know that’s where he is at this moment. I heard some songs, and I think it’s fresh. I think the people are ready for it.

Not everybody is ready for it, but I’m with him on the sentiment. When asked by MTV what music inspires him, Lil Wayne said:

Everybody’s doing their thing, but they’re not exciting. Everybody is doing the same thing. That’s terrible. Do I love the music that’s out right now? I love it with a passion. Does it motivate me? Not one bit. That’s because 808s & Heartbreak isn’t out yet.

Opinionson the album are widely divided. Some of my friends get angry when they hear 808s, or even when they talk about it. A lot of critics hated it. Here’s a quote from Andy Kellman’s two-star review in Allmusic:

For anyone sifting through a broken relationship and self-letdown, this could all be therapeutic. Otherwise, no matter its commendable fearlessness, the album is a listless, bleary trudge along West’s permafrost.

I’m happily married and I find the album to actually be kind of uplifting. But then, I like frosty music.

The Boston Globe complained that because of the Auto-tune, “you don’t get a real sense of [Kanye's] vocal chops.” I think you get an excellent sense. With Auto-tune, his chops are great. There are a few vulnerable moments where he turns it off, and then his chops are terrible. I find the emotional effect of the contrast to be super powerful. It’s something I strive to emulate in my own music.

A lot of people can’t get past the equation of Auto-tune with cheating. John Caramanica said in The New York Times:

Mr West can’t sing, and it is that weakness for which this album will ultimately be remembered, some solid songs notwithstanding. For him, using Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software with the robotic vocal effect, is a true crutch… At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose.

I think Mr West can sing, using this particular tool. Saying he can’t sing because he needs some tools to optimize his sound is like saying Jimi Hendrix couldn’t play guitar because he couldn’t have played Purple Haze on a nylon-string acoustic.

Also, I think John Caramanica is wrong about ornamentation. Stripping away ornamentation is brave, and generous. You can fill in all the little curlicues in your head anyway. Actually, it’s fun to do that. Keeping the music spacious and empty invites audience participation. Kanye goes a step further in inviting you to participate. He gives away mp3s of the instrumentals for “Love Lockdown” conveniently separated by track for your remixing pleasure.

A more positive review came from Salon:

“808s & Heartbreak” belongs to a mini-genre of “woke up this morning/ got me the superstar blues” albums, alongside Nirvana’s “In Utero” and Puff Daddy’s “Forever.” What redeems the record is its sound, whose intimate relationship with technology is emblazoned in the album’s title. The Roland 808 is hip-hop’s famous drum machine, a sound at once vintage and timeless, like the wah-wah guitar in rock. 808 bass lines (made by detuning the kick drum) are prominent in West’s album, not in their typical block-rocking mode but as a subdued pitter-patter, the pulse of a worried heart.

“Heartbreak” refers to the emotion (West has had a bad year, no doubt) and also to a sound he’s devised using studio technology, which is slathered over virtually every vocal on the album. “It’s Auto-Tune meets distortion, with a bit of delay on it,” he said in a recent interview. “And a whole bunch of fucked-up life. That’s what I call my ‘Heartbreak.’”

Auto-Tune can also be deliberately misused or overdone. Radiohead dabbled with the device during the experimental “Kid A/Amnesiac” sessions, discovering that if you spoke words rather than sang them, the confused machine would try to assign notes to your speech and produce an impressively avant-garde-sounding cluster of dissonant and random-seeming notes. More typically, it’s used to create a kind of cyber-melisma effect, a fluttery vocal sound simultaneously evocative of angelic purity and a lovelorn robot. The most famous early example was Cher’s “Believe” at the turn of the decade, but since then the effect has popped up regularly in R&B and dance hall records, sometimes as a momentary glisten of posthuman perfection irradiating a particular line, sometimes coating the entire vocal in the gimmicky tradition of the 1970s vocoder and talk-box. This year it resurged as a fad sound, with the R&B singer T-Pain building a career around its glutinous, glucose texture.

Jumping on a bandwagon that’s already been around the block several times doesn’t quite fit the profile of a self-styled innovator, but West has made Auto-Tune his own, both by adding extra effects like distortion that push the sound to the edge of pain and by making it the defining sound of his new album. “808s & Heartbreak” starts with five down-tempo songs in a row that could be chips off the same sonic block, starting with “Say You Will” and climaxing with his smash hit single “Love Lockdown,” whose dolorous melody is offset by an incongruously harsh clatter of drums. Because it’s not just the vocals that are interfered with: Almost the album’s entire sound palette is distorted. “Paranoid,” the first of the few fast songs on the album, sandwiches a pretty melody between a grating synth riff and gnarly drum beats; “Robocop” is woven virtually completely from abrasively lo-fi sounds; and bursts of pure noise pepper “Coldest Winter.”

These abrasive digital effects — noises that make the ear flinch, like the sudden surge of distortion on the vocal early on in “Love Lockdown” — are motivated by the desire to find new ways to communicate pain. West wants to make his music sound how he feels, which is raw, skinless, unprotected.

[W]est’s cold and dehumanized sounds, which could have served as a mask, instead allow us to see right through him.

Rap-Up.com wrote about the 808s debut listening party:

Kanye launched into a speech about how much he loves using Auto-Tune and that lately the term has been associated with being “wack” much to his dismay. “Never lose your childhood,” he told the crowd, explaining how he wanted to go back to feeling like a child, overwhelmed and carefree. Auto-Tune reminded him of those early days. As a kid, he thought the color pink was cool until someone told him “it was gay.” He then excitedly exclaimed, “Pink is better than blue!” Ye expressed his admiration for T-Pain, saying “his light was so bright.” He further explained his belief that society and culture steal confidence and self-esteem from you when you’re a child. You’re born with it, but society takes it away. If he was 8 years old, he would have walked into a recording studio and told the engineer, “Give me Auto-Tune!” He officially declared it “the funnest thing to use.”

Childishness is usually not a charming quality in other people, but artists do us a favor by maintaining the inner toddler. Sometimes the inner toddler makes you behave inappropriately.

Hipster Runoff has this long thing about Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift that’s worth quoting at length. The post’s title is also its thesis, one I agree with: “It takes a socially transcendent moment to remind us what makes life worth living. Kanye West is a valuable member of society.”

Last Sunday night, I was browsing the internet, and all of a sudden, everything came to a halt. It was as if one moment “made the world stop.” This single moment demanded the instantaneous attention of the every human being in the Westernized world. After experiencing this moment, every human “came up with an opinion” on the event, and felt obliged to share this opinion with the world [via life stream/social network/ real life interaction]. It was truly one of the greatest live moments in the history of the world because 2009 has given us the proper tools to instantaneously reflect on a moment in a group setting. It was as if “social media” finally had a reason for existing (besides helping 2 elect the black President).

As a society, we must come together and root for Kanye West to continue to create content & headlines. While he is genuinely pursuing greatness, his narcissistic qualities will surely lead to his premature death. This is more than about needing “good guys” and “bad guys” to create conflict and news. We need a stream of content that we can continually reflect upon. This is why we miss Michael Jackson so much, we had the opportunity to have fun watching him fall apart together. It was legitimately a bullying process that rallied all humans together. It didn’t matter how smart or how dumb u were, there was something inherently funny about making fun of Michael Jackson’s racial, sexual, and social identity. A type of humor that transcended educational levels and class divisions.

Taylor Swift represents everything that is wrong with show business and the arts. We must respect Kanye West and his neverending quest to express his true self to the real world…

We must accept Kanye West as the true heir to the King of Pop — not because of his talent or his artistic interpretation of the world, but because of his ability to create content. He can rapidly produce albums as well as public incidents that are indicative of a deeply troubled human being. He transcends “right and wrong” because he truly “acts from the heart/soul” in a world where most people are too smart/deliberate/PR-managed to act upon their emotions.

A lot of people say that twitter is a “useless and boring display of humanity.” These people don’t understand the true value of twitter — twitter is an instant window into the lives of people. A chance to track the distractions that are filling up people’s lives, momentarily taking over their brains. An impact significant enough to process a lil thought/meme about it. Whether it is a human, a product, a political scandal, a television show, a movie, or a celeb death, the twitter portal into a generalized human psyche is priceless.

We must embrace the power of this tool. We must embrace all tools that allow us to reflect/share/digitally mourn.

We are growing up, learning how to use social networks to experience life together. We are learning how to mourn, celebrate, and crucify miscellaneous celebrities. We are learning that death memes are the memes that unite us. The internet/internet meme is a coping mechanism/opportunity.

When President Obama called Kanye a jackass, he said it with genuine warmth and affection in his voice. I think the President has the right attitude.

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 case.

It wasn’t even Lil Wayne’s rhymes that caught my ear in the first place, it was his tracks. His music sounds fine on regular headphones or speakers, but it reveals its true power in the club or in a car with a good system. The tempos are slow, the beats are minimalist, and there’s plenty of space around every sonic event. On the big hits, like “A Milli” and “Lollipop”, an 8o8 kick drum is the only sound in the low register. There’s usually no bass guitar or even bass synth – the tuned 808 kick carries the bassline. The vocals, snares, hi-hats and synths are all up in the high frequencies. The midrange is totally empty.

Emptying the midrange adapts Wayne’s music perfectly to its natural habitat: cars, parties, clubs, subway trains and other noisy, less-than-ideal listening environments. In a club or a party, the midrange is full of people talking. In a car or train, the midrange is full of engine and wind noise. Keeping the music’s midrange empty means that it doesn’t have to compete with the ambient sound. The songs can sound huge and full and totally present without blowing your eardrums or your speakers out. Another benefit of the empty midrange is that it leaves room for you to enjoy the upper overtones of the kickdrum. Even severely compressed and played through computer speakers, Lil Wayne’s music sounds pretty damn hot:

The weird vocal sample the song is named for comes from “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (Vampire Mix),” a remix of the Tribe Called Quest song by Fatboy Slim. The original Tribe song has a sample in it of “Funky” by The Chambers Brothers. That makes “A Milli” a remix of a remix of a remix. Recursive!

I’ve been drawn to the musicality of hip-hop since I was a kid, but at times I’ve been scared off by all the angry and confrontational language. As a kid, I could mostly enjoy with Run-DMC. Sometimes I found them a little bit scary, but mostly they made sense to me. My friend Elbert played me some Public Enemy in ninth grade, and I felt like it wasn’t meant for me, but I liked it. When we got into the nineties, that’s when I lost touch with hip-hop. I wanted to like the Wu-Tang Clan and the west coast gangsta rappers, but I got scared away.

It took me several more years to realize that I wasn’t supposed to be taking all the imagery literally. I didn’t understand that rappers, like rock singers, are often playing characters or doing standup comedy. It makes sense that Ice Cube has made such a smooth transition from gangsta rap to family comedies. Hip-hop has a lot of theatricality and irony to it, and even a liberal, open-minded white guy like me can lose sight of that. I fell into the bad habit of underestimating the intelligence of hip-hop artists and didn’t allow for the possibility of multiple or opposite meanings to what I was hearing. Imagine if you were plunked down in America without any cultural context and someone showed you an episode of South Park or Family Guy. If you didn’t realize they were kidding, you’d probably be horrified. That’s pretty much what my first reaction was to the dirtier hip-hop styles.

I’m glad I let go of my moral objections to Lil Wayne. He’s crude a lot of the time, but he’s never dumb, and he’s capable of dazzling verbal virtuosity. There’s the famous line in “Lollipop” that everybody quotes, it’s like what Cole Porter would be writing if he were a young guy right now:

Safe sex is great sex. Better use a latex,
’cause you don’t want that late text, that “I think I’m late” text.

Lil Wayne’s high opinion of himself extends to his choice of samples. He samples several of his own tracks for his song “I’m Me.” Again: recursive.

Like his frequent collaborators T-Pain and Kanye West, Lil Wayne likes singing with Auto-tune.

If you haven’t been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, “Lollipop” represents the state of the art well. The synths are gridded out exactly in a sequencer so as to sound totally posthuman. Wayne plays a little electric guitar with a sloppiness that balances the synths’ unearthly perfection. There are big yawning digital silences in the rhythm that are as powerful as the beats themselves.

The Auto-tuned robo-vocal style inspired me to sing more on my own tracks, which is a minor miracle, because I am not a singer. The sign of a real master musician is when they fill me with an intense, competitive desire to go apply their tricks to some new music of my own.

I think Lil Wayne’s music is healthy for nerdy white people like me. Having a sense of humor about the human body and its functions is the right attitude. Natalie Portman kind of says it best, when she’s asked what song reflects her current state by Interview Magazine:

PORTMAN: Really, really obscene hip-hop. I love it so much. It makes me laugh and then it makes me want to dance. Those are like my two favorite things, so combined . . . I’ve been listening a lot lately to “Wait (The Whisper Song)” by the Ying Yang Twins, where the lyrics are like, “Wait ’til you see my dick” – which is just amazing because it’s whispered. [whispers] “Wait ’til you see my dick . . . ” [laughs] Crazy. So I just listen to it like I’m a five-year-old, like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe he just said that!”

When she rapped on Saturday Night Live, she was kind of kidding, kind of not.

In some ways this could be a Jewish thing. Like Natalie, my mom and the majority of my relatives are in the tribe. I went to a mostly Jewish elementary and high school. My Jewish side finds America’s puritanism weird and lame. I also have a midwestern protestant side I inherited from my dad. This side of me thinks prudishness is lame, but also Not Optional. So there’s some internal conflict. It can be like Jon Stewart vs Hank Hill in my head. Lil Wayne is a good ally in my struggle to keep Hank under control.

But then, Lil Wayne may have more in common with Hank Hill than we realize. He carefully cultivates the image of a stoned slacker, but that performance masks an intense work ethic. It’s significant that the “A Milli” video shows Lil Wayne doing his job. He records new material almost every night. I can’t think of any recording artist who’s been more prolific than he has. Almost everything he records, he makes public. Some of it gets sold commercially, the rest he gives away on mixtapes and the web. He puts out so many tracks that Vibe could write an article called “The 77 best Lil Wayne songs of 2007.” He talks about his process a little in Rolling Stone:

You never write down your rhymes. Do you ever forget good stuff?

I do that a lot and it sucks. That’s why I keep the studio with me everywhere I go. I can just hook up the studio straight to my laptop and start recording. I don’t memorize lyrics like a speech. I just go to the studio and think of it right there. I just let the beat play a trillion times and I go in there and record four bars or whatever I thought of so I can get it off my mind and start thinking about something else. That’s why I do my songs so quick.

I think any creative person could learn a lot from the Lil Wayne strategy. Computer recording encourages improvisation. Improvising is a bottomless source of new ideas. Creativity is evolutionary, you need to have a lot of failures to naturally select out the hits. The wider the diversity of your failures, the more hits you’ll produce. That’s why Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones recorded hundreds of demos so they could narrow them down into the songs on Thriller. Lil Wayne takes the idea up a notch by releasing everything for public consumption and letting the fans decide what works and what doesn’t. I’d guess this demanding routine keeps him from ever getting hung up, from getting too precious. He probably gets things right in a very few tries. Keeping your ideas under so much evolutionary pressure makes them definite. As Lil Wayne says in “Shoot Me Down”:

My picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition of definition.

He’s definite enough to have sampled the Beatles and gotten the copyright smackdown for it. (Thanks to Sasha Frere-Jones for pointing me to this.)

The comments on this video are hostile. I can understand not liking the music, but the anger is way more intense than that. I can’t imagine having so many people that angry at me. If Lil Wayne can keep his confidence up in the face of so much scrutiny and resistance, I don’t see how any creative person has any excuse not to step up their game.

Here’s my mashup of Lil Wayne and Björk.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

To download, right-click or option-click the link and save the file to your desktop.

Your voice can produce a smooth continuum of pitches. To sing, you eliminate most of those possibilities, vibrating your mouth and throat only at certain frequencies, the pitches of the melody. Auto-tune helps by shifting the voice’s frequency to the closest desired piano-key pitch.

Towards the bottom left is a knob labeled Retune Speed. Even the best singers waver around their intended pitch for a few milliseconds before converging on it. If you correct away that wavering, the result sounds artificial. So Auto-tune can be set to delay its effects. Slower retune speeds allow more human-sounding shakiness to pass through the filter. If you set the retune speed to zero, there’s no wavering allowed, and you get the robo-vocal sound beloved by T-Pain, Kanye West and Lil Wayne. It’s more widely known as the Cher Effect, because a lot of people first encountered it in her song “Believe.”

Hear the Cher Effect at work in my mashup of the Beatles, M.I.A. and Missy Elliot with vocals by Barbara Singer. The exotic melisma comes from Auto-tuning Barbara to the mixolydian mode.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

There’s a persistent and false story that Cher used a vocoder for “Believe.” The producers lied in interviews, not wanting to give away their trade secret. Auto-tune isn’t exactly a software vocoder, but it’s based on the same math.

Music-theoretically, the interesting part of Auto-tune is the center of the window, listing the twelve pitches on a piano. By default, Auto-tune is set to the chromatic scale, all the piano keys, starting on C:

To Auto-tune yourself in C major, you need to remove C sharp, D sharp, F sharp, G sharp and A sharp. (There are no flats for some reason.)

This is a lot like the way you set up a xylophone or marimba for a beginner. By taking the bars for the undesired notes off, you make it impossible to play anything wrong.

A bit of fun for music nerds: the notes you omit from the C major scale, the black keys on the piano, form the F sharp major pentatonic and E flat minor pentatonic scales.

To make the C natural minor scale,  you omit C sharp, E, F sharp, A and B.

To get the other minor scales, you’d just need to toggle the sixth and seventh notes differently. For C dorian you’d leave A in and remove G#.

Here’s how you’d set up the C blues scale:

“A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane starts with this fanfare on the notes B, E and F sharp.

In the key of C, the fanfare’s three pitches are C, F and G.

This is one of my favorite Auto-tune settings. It sounds amazing on speech.

It’s even more fun to strip the pitch set down even further, taking out the F and even the G for maximum posthuman warbling. Being limited to a smaller group of pitches forces you to concentrate on rhythmic patterns. Check out how cool it sounds when we Auto-tune Barbara to just the root note for the second verse, or just the fifth on the outtro:

Revival Revival – Those Shoes Never Scared by ethanhein

Auto-tune’s binary representation of the combinational possibilities of music theory is similar to the way I learned how to conceive my chords and scales in jazz training. You can derive any scale or chord by starting with the chromatic scale and omitting the wrong notes.

Sometimes you want to be constrained to a traditional scale, but more often the blend of pitches you want is more idiosyncratic. In major keys, you very often want to use the minor third and sometimes minor sixth. For a blues feel in any key, you can include the flat fifth. Omitting the fourth and seventh from a major or minor scale makes a dissonance-free pentatonic.

Here’s how you can build your own scales, chords and pitch groups in the key of C, in or out of Auto-tune.

C: The root or tonic. Probably leave it on.

C#: The flat second. Leave on for Middle Eastern music, turn off for Western.

D: Second. Usually leave on, except for Middle Eastern music.

D#: Minor third. Leave on for tragedy and blues.

E: Major third. Leave on for happy, turn off for sad.

F: Fourth. Probably leave on unless you’re making major pentatonic.

F#: Flat fifth, sharp fourth. Leave on for blues and exotica.

G: Fifth. Probably leave on, though try turning it off for fun.

G#: Minor sixth. Leave on for tragic feel.

A: Major sixth. Leave on for bright/happy feel.

A#: Minor seventh. Leave on for blues, minor, rock, or mixolydian.

B: Major seventh. Leave on for major and harmonic minor, brightness, and suspense.

See more scales in Auto-tune representation.

Symmetry and patterns register on the ears and eyes differently, but there’s substantial and intriguing overlap. If you illuminate every other note on the list, you get the whole tone scale. If you alternate skipping a note, not skipping the next one, skipping the one after that and so on, you get the diminished scale. The symmetries of those scales announce themselves to the ear immediately, though you may not be able to figure out what specifically the symmetries are.

I’m pretty psyched about the convergence of the mind’s eye and the mind’s ear. All digital music-making tools have a synaesthetic element. For visual thinkers like me, the computer’s music visualization tools have opened up some big new swaths of sonic terrain.

Any interesting related music visualization systems out there? Hit me in the comments.

Auto-tune entered my musical life mainly from my work with Barbara Singer, who I met in 2003. She posted in the Craigslist Musicians section about this gig she had at the now-defunct Korova Milk Bar in the East Village, and how she was looking for a guitarist or some other instrumentalist. The idea was this: she would mix beats on a Roland MC-909 groovebox and sing, and I would improvise textural guitar sounds on top. Her repertoire was a set of pop songs in a variety of genres, sung in a flat, affectless voice thickly coated in digital abstraction: delay, harmonizer, distortion, peculiar reverbs.

We tried several different iterations of the band over the next few years, playing and recording, experimenting in open-ended ways. Then a few things happened in my musical life. Guitar gigs dried up. Laptop DJ gigs appeared slowly in their place. I got deeply into Reason, then Recycle, and the production possibilities of Pro Tools. I wrote and recorded a lot of spacy R&B with Nicole Bishop that got increasingly posthuman and electronic as we went along. Nicole is a legit singer with good chops, but we still did some pitch correction on her using Melodyne, for instance to organize her melismas into definite melodies. Melodyne is designed to make the singer still sound human at the end, and it doesn’t do that perfectly quantized, hard right angled robot sound we were hearing on the radio. So I shelled out for Auto-tune. I tried it on Nicole and it was rad. Then I tried it on Barbara and it was even more rad. Filtered through Auto-tune, her voice took on a keyboard-like quality that we realized was the missing ingredient in the sound we’d been after for five years. We’ve used it on everything we’ve recorded since.

To give you an idea how Auto-tune works, check out this image from wikipedia. It illustrates a different digital audio concept, but it’s a useful visualization of Auto-tune as well.

Imagine that the red line shows a singer’s actual pitch, swooping up, then down, then back up. The horizontal grey lines are different piano-keyboard pitches. Auto-tune snaps the red line to the closest grey line to produce the stairstepped black line,  the robo-vocal sound on so many recent hip-hop songs.

A lot of singers I know don’t like Auto-tune. They grumble that they shouldn’t have bothered to do all that practicing and studying. Auto-tune makes things easier in the studio, and increasingly on stage, no doubt about it. This bothers people who care about how difficult music is to make. Auto-tune threatens some of the myths we have about musicality: that it’s a special talent possessed only by an exceptional few, and that there’s something noble and admirable in the lifetime of discipline it requires. When Lil Wayne goes into a recording studio, smokes a blunt or three and freestyles an Auto-tuned melody off the top of his head, it calls our European-descended assumptions about romantic musical heroism into question.

In my opinion, this is all for the best. Music isn’t fundamentally about technique. It’s a transmission medium for emotions. A confident and definite performance comes across, accurate pitch or no. When you have a singer do take after take after take in search of technical perfection, you often end up with the sound of a bored and annoyed singer. Bored and annoyed singers are a drag to listen to, no matter how accurate a their pitch is. First takes are very often the best ones because of their freshness and immediacy. Cee-Lo Green’s spine-tingling lead vocal on Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was a first take. I don’t know how much postprocessing they did on Cee-Lo. Maybe it was none, maybe it was a lot. Who, aside from the people in the recording studio that day, cares?

A lot of people care, apparently. The music world is doing a lot of hand-wringing over Auto-tune right now. There’s a sense that it’s cheating somehow, and a few singers make a point to brag about not using it. I found this Neko Case quote from the Wikipedia article on pitch correction:

I’m not a perfect note hitter either but I’m not going to cover it up with auto tune. Everybody uses it, too. I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, “How many people don’t use auto tune?” and he said, “You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who’ve never used it in here.” Even though I’m not into Nelly Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It’s cool that she has some integrity.

Really? This makes Nelly Furtado cool? Personally, I find her music to be pretty lame, her strong pitch notwithstanding. Neko Case and Nelly Furtado might be “better” singers than Britney Spears when you hear them alone and unaccompanied in a room, but when are you ever likely to hear that? In their actual context of lavishly expensive production, Britney is by far my favorite singer of the three, because her style is suited to the realities of her musical context.

It’s way too late in the history of technology to be worrying about authenticity. What’s so authentic about recorded sound to begin with? Neko Case isn’t in the room singing when you plays an MP3 or CD or cassette or record of her. What’s so authentic about multitrack recording, compression, EQ, pop filters, artificial reverb, or selecting from multiple takes to find the best one? All that matters to me when I listen is how the music makes me feel. No amount of “authenticity” can make up for an untruthful or unimaginative musician. It isn’t Auto-tune that makes Lil Wayne and Kanye West so compelling. Those guys could find a way to do a hot track using a comb and wax paper. Conversely, Auto-tune can make bad singers less irritating, but it can’t make them sound exciting or memorable.

For my tastes, the most musical uses of Auto-tune come from contrasts. The extreme perfection works best when balanced by roughness and rawness elsewhere. One of my favorite tracks is M.I.A.’s otherworldly protest rap “20 Dollar.” Her wordless Cher-effect melismas are balanced by her loosely pitched uncorrected singing on the choruses and her unpitched rapping in the verses. Also, she layers distortion and reverb on top of the melismas to harshen them and remove their bubblegum quality.

Art is all about happy accidents, unintended consequences, serendipitous discoveries. Our feeble minds are nowhere near powerful enough to have good ideas just by wanting them. The first people to feed guitar amps back did it accidentally. It took the wisdom of Jimi Hendrix and his fellow hippie rockers to realize that this technical “mistake” could be the basis of new creativity. When you use Auto-tune’s Cher effect, it produces a clicky warble that sounds “bad” if you’re trying to have the effect be transparent. But the warble has a delightful set of qualities of its own. It introduces new rhythms into previously rhythmless sustained notes. If you add a little digital delay, the warble locks satisfyingly into the beat of the song. By flattening the vertical pitch aspect of a singer’s voice, Auto-tune draws out the horizontal qualities, the vibrato (as opposed to tremolo), the nasalness vs throatiness, the overtones and partials. A quick fillip to a neighboring chord tone that would normally pass unnoticed by singer and listener alike suddenly takes on dramatic musical significance when exaggerated by Auto-tune.

My favorite sound on Barbara is a blend of multiple different Auto-tune settings on the same vocal. We’ll have the same vocal playing on several tracks simultaneously, with one totally dry, one Auto-tuned to the scale of the song, and one Auto-tuned to just the root and fifth of the key for nice wide warbles.

We’ve only just begun to explore the qualites of Auto-tuned whispering, whistling and growling.

My sister Molly was visiting during one of our recent band practices, and she spent some time horsing around with Babsy’s vocal setup. She observed that Auto-tune is the best karaoke device in history. Molly is a terrific singer, but like most of us, she suffers from self-consciousness. By making it impossible for her to sound bad, Auto-tune liberated her playful musicality. Auto-tune inspires fearlessness, which inspires improvisation, which produces fun for everyone in the room. What more could you ask from a music tool?

Update: I wrote a followup post on how Auto-tune helps you understand music theory, and another about Auto-tune The News.

Further update: This post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music-making.