Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.

Self-reference makes loops possible, which is great for programming. But sometimes the computer gets stuck in those loops. XKCD gives a playful illustration of how this can happen, using ducks.

We experience these infinite loops as computer crashes. The computer isn’t “stuck” when it crashes; it’s just running the same few instructions over and over.

The computer can’t break its own loops by “stepping outside of itself;” it needs an external agent to intervene, like you hitting the reset button.

The operations of our minds are also heavily recursive and self-referential. But unlike computers, we aren’t prone to getting stuck in loops, and we seem to be unfazed by logical paradoxes. Some of us even find them beautiful. Nature is full of self-similar, “paradoxical” structures like fractals.

Biological systems are especially self-similar and fractal-like.
Our brains are full of recursive loops. The brain’s representation of itself to itself is probably the basis of our consciousness.

The profoundest truths take on the quality of strange loops, GEB’s useful shorthand for recursive paradoxes. Here’s a diagram I made of the “heterarchy” of human knowledge.

Bach isn’t the only musician to use recursion and self-reference. Hip-hop and other sample-based music use it too, in the form of artists sampling their own songs within their own songs. Here are some blog posts digging into this idea.

• Biggie Biggie Smalls Is The Illest
• Eric B and Rakim
• Nas Is Like
• In A Silent Way is a remix of itself
• Self-reference in computer programming and hip-hop
• Take it to the bridge

Hofstadter also tackles the concept of emergence, the way that an intelligent mind can arise from the interaction of unintelligent component. He compares the mind to an anthill — the collective ant colony has intelligence, even though the individual ants are dumb.

Finally, the book is the best introduction to Zen Buddhist thinking that I’ve come across. Hofstadter observes that westerners are used to thinking in terms of neat Manichean categories — profound truths are unambiguously true or false. Zen prepares the mind to deal with Gödelian paradoxes, strange loops, fractals and the like.

I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in reading GEB from cover to cover. It’s not really that kind of book. I prefer to just open to a random page and struggle with whatever concept I find there. I recommend a similar approach.

Original post on Quora

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

Music notation

Western music notation is a venerable method of visualizing music. It’s a very neat and compact system, unambiguous and digital, and not too difficult to learn. Programs like Sibelius can effortlessly translate notation to and from MIDI data, too.

But western notation has some limitations, especially for contemporary music. It doesn’t handle microtones well. It has limited ability to convey performative nuance — after a hundred years of jazz, there’s no good way to notate swing other than to just write the word “swing” at the top of the score. The key signature system works fine for major keys, but is less helpful for minor keys and modal music and is pretty much worthless for the blues.

Here’s a suggestion for how notation could improve in the future. It’s a visualization by Jon Snydal of John Coltrane’s solo in Miles Davis’ “All Blues”  (I edited it a little to be easier on the eyes.)

Snydal’s visualization is more analog than digital — it shows the exact nuances of Coltrane’s performance, with subtle shadings of pitch, timing and dynamics.

MIDI sequencers suggest further improvements over standard notation. Here’s a simplified electronic music sequencer called iNudge. Play, it’s fun:

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s tune “Four In One” as shown in standard MIDI “piano roll” view. The rectangles show not only which notes are being played and when, but exactly how long they’re held. Darker red means louder, paler pink means quieter. You can also read volume off the bars along the bottom.

MIDI is a versatile and user-friendly system. It can capture your keyboard performances, you can import scores, and you can even just draw notes onto the screen directly (my preferred method.)

The Music Animation Machine has a wonderful series of videos matching MIDI piano rolls of various classical pieces with recordings of them. Here’s Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

As software gets more sophisticated in its ability to extract pitch data from actual audio recordings, you can start manipulating them with the same ease as MIDI. Here’s a screencap of the pitch-correction program Melodyne, a close cousin of Auto-tune.

The lines show the actual sung pitches, and the orange blobs show the notes the program thinks the singer meant to hit. The blobs’ thickness shows volume. You can drag and drop the blobs and redraw the lines at will to alter the melody to your heart’s content. Melodyne even transcribes the performance to standard notation and MIDI for you.

High and low

We’ve made up our collective mind that faster frequencies should be spatially represented as being “higher,” and that slower ones should be spatially “lower.” It seems so reasonable, but really it’s totally arbitrary, and doesn’t even line up with physical experience. On the piano, the high notes are on the right and the low ones on the left. On the guitar, the “low” E string is physically located above the “high” one. The fingerings for higher and lower notes on wind instruments don’t correspond to a simple higher-lower axis either.

Absolute pitch is a straight line ladder, but pitch class is circular. The truest representation of pitch space is a helix.

Other ways to conceptualize pitch space

High and low aren’t the only metaphors we use for faster and slower vibrations. Like I said, pitch class is circular.

But the circle is really just replacing up/down with clockwise/counterclockwise. There are other ways to conceptualize pitch. We intuitively experience changing pitches as moving closer and further, or inwards and outwards. We also think of higher pitches as brighter and lower pitches as darker. Players of stringed instruments sometimes tune their upper strings a little bit too high on purpose, producing an effect known as brilliance.

Time

It’s a universal convention that notation shows time moving from left to right. But that’s not the only possible axis to use. How about forwards and backwards instead? That’s the paradigm in rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. The purest realization of this concept is in a game called FreQuency.

The game even allows you to construct your own remixes.

I like this tunnel metaphor and would like to see it extended into a full-blown production environment.

Waves

Pitches are sine-wave vibrations, and you can visualize them as such.

Sine waves wouldn’t make for very a helpful music notation, but they do help you understand what’s going on scientifically when you physically hear something. They’re even better animated:

See all of Wikipedia’s animated drum heads.

Waveforms

Audio editors show music as amplitude waveforms, blobs that get wider where the sound is louder. Here’s the Funky Drummer break in Recycle. The blue blobs show drum hits. These amplitude blobs don’t tell you much about the musical content except for timing and volume. But Recycle was meant for drum loops, where timing and volume are the only information you really need.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the Funky Drummer as it’s looping:

In a post on Design Observer, Rob Walker discusses the waveform as the new icon for music, replacing the stylized eighth notes or records that have done the job in the past. The SoundCloud player uses an attractive waveform graphic that helps the listener track where they are in the song by following the volume peaks. There’s even a SoundCloud group called Pretty Waveforms.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

The waveform has the potential to move from purely functional settings to more decorative ones. Here’s a waveform-based labeling concept by Joshua Distler, showing the tracks on Post by Björk.

Music theory and networks

I’ve always thought it would be cool to use networks to conceptualize music theory, and have made a few attempts at doing so. Here’s a comparison between the circle of half-steps and the circle of fifths, which are involutes of each other:

Here’s a map of the chord progressions in “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

And here’s a flowchart showing how you can figure out what scale or mode you’re hearing.

It would be way cooler to have more abstract three-dimensional interactive visualizations showing how chords, scales and melodies function. Leonhard Euler showed how you can represent tonal harmony as a lattice with the topology of a torus, as shown in this animation. Red lines show major thirds, green lines show minor thirds, and blue lines show fifths:

I have ambitions of my own in this area, but so far, I lack the programming skills to realize them. Others are taking some exciting strides, though. Dmitri Tymoczko made waves for getting the first music-related article published in Science about his topological visualization methods for tonal harmony. I can’t quite wrap my head around his ideas, but they’re intriguing.

Here’s an illustration by Aniruddh Patel from his paper, “Language, Music, Syntax And The Brain.” Again, I’m not totally clear what it all means, but I plan to investigate further.

Other theorists have attempted to use color to show harmonic function. Scriabin invented a “keyboard of lights” for that purpose, though it didn’t really catch on.

Visualizing musical form and structure

I like to use simple color-coding to keep track of which section is which while working on a song. Yellow is for intros and outtros, blue is for verses, green is for choruses and orange is for instrumentals and breakdowns.

Edward Tufte shows some more sophisticated song structure visualizations on his forum:

The Shape of Song project by Martin Wattenburg shows repetition within a piece of music. Here’s his visualization of “Like A Prayer” by Madonna.

Here’s Wattenburg’s visualization of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

Speculation

Here’s an entertaining video showing how you can create a happening drum machine sequence using counting in binary by Niklas Roy.

Wouldn’t this graph coloring system make a cool music notation or interface?

Visual Complexity has many more ideas like this one.

I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of useful and attractive schemes. Are there other cool visualization methods I should know about? Hit the comments.

Updates

John Clover hipped me to this post, which overlaps heavily: Amazing Music Visualizations and Teaching

I just had the chance to play with some of Björk‘s Biophilia song/apps. Some of them are groundbreaking interactive visualizations; some are just entertaining and groovy; some are baffling but deserve points for creativity. All the way around, it’s a remarkable experiment, one that I think is going to be influential.

See this post on Quora

My friend Andrew, who was at the show, said this afterwards: “I can’t decide whether hearing the president say ‘This is not class warfare, it’s math’ or the fact that this band could become popular makes me feel more optimistic about the possibilities of life in America.”

Merrill Garbus started receiving rapturous praise from the indie-rock press a couple of years ago. I read her adulatory New Yorker profile and was immediately skeptical — in the abstract, the idea of a white indie rocker playing African music on a ukelele is not an enticing proposition for me. But curiosity got the better of me, and when I listened to some tracks, I was immediately hooked.

Stylistically, Tune-Yards is an unlikely combination of Fela Kuti, Medúlla-era Björk, Reggie Watts and Primus. Merrill Garbus uses pedals to sample and loop her voice and drumming, and plays baritone ukelele. Sometimes she strums it like a guitar, but she also plays fingerstyle in a way that evokes thumb piano. She’s accompanied by a bassist and two tenor sax players, all of whom also play assorted percussion instruments. See the band in action:

Here’s an actual music video:

Why does this music excite me so much?

The most obvious pleasure is Merrill G’s tremendous talent as a singer. Underneath all the growling and shrieking, she has a legit voice, with a big range and precise pitch control when she wants it. She’s an electrifying stage presence, too, with a relaxed intensity and unfakeable confidence.

Merrill G’s writing is interesting too, though not as consistent as her performance. Her tunes are quirky, thorny and dense. They have a lot of abrupt starts and stops, and show clear signs of being assembled solo in a bedroom on Garageband. Merrill G is masterful with the rhythmic and sonic aspects of English, with a dense syllabic flow that leans toward hip-hop. (She also sings a bit in Swahili.) Her melodies are chants or simple pentatonics, but still manage to show a lot of personal idiosyncrasy, like her penchant for starting and ending on scale degree two.

It’s always politically tricky when white musicians imitate black music. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a bad white rapper, for example. White musicians have a very mixed track record with African sounds. I’m totally in favor of David Byrne and Paul Simon, but Vampire Weekend is painful. Merrill G has so far been a lot closer to David Byrne. Rather than imitating the surface sounds of African music, she’s internalized it and used it to express the truth of her inner self. Some of the technique might be borrowed from Africa, but the content is all about modern America, and it feels truthful and authentic coming from her.

Live looping

The most significant aspect of Tune-Yards’ music is Merrill G’s use of live looping. Anyone who wants to make groove-oriented music in the present moment faces a dilemma. Live drummers tend to fall back into tiresome rock cliches, which get lamer with every passing year. On the other hand, sampled and programmed beats aren’t conducive to dynamic live performances. It’s hard to get that feeling of excitement from watching someone press the space bar on a laptop and then just… stand there.

Live looping gives Tune-Yards the best of both worlds. Merrill G records her drum patterns into the loop pedal right in front of you, one instrument at a time: floor tom, rim shots, snare, cymbals. She couldn’t use rock cliches if she wanted to, since she plays standing up and doesn’t use a kick drum. Because she doesn’t always nail her patterns exactly, her loops have an appealing human quality. And she mixes it up, so some tunes use only looped drums, some use both looped and live drums, and some are played entirely live.

Merrill G’s looped vocals are even fresher-sounding than the drums. Sometimes she uses them to do conventional backing vocals with herself. Sometimes the vocals act as a rhythmic element. Sometimes they build into hair-raising noise collage. Most songs use some combination of the above. By stopping and starting the loops in unexpected places, the tunes are spiced with attention-grabbing silences, a much better way to snap the room into focus than boring fills and crescendos.

If you couldn’t tell from reading this blog, I’m not too wild about rock and roll these days. I enjoy the classics, but I don’t think there’s much juice left in the orange anymore. I like Tune-Yards because they rock, incredibly hard, without falling back on tired rock tropes. I’d like to hear more music like that.

Some wishes

One of the high points of the show was when Merrill G had us all sing a long sustained note, the fifth of the key, through a section of one song. There’s room for way more audience participation than that in the Tune-Yards experience. I’d love to see Merrill sample the crowd clapping a simple pattern, or chanting, and then build on top. Audience participation is one of the main things missing from most concerts, and when you do it right, it’s magical. It’s one of the great sicknesses of our society that we leave music-making to specialists, while most people just passively observe. Tune-Yards could create some truly ecstatic group music-making, without having to get all kumbaya about it.

I also wouldn’t mind hearing Tune-Yards slip a cover or two into the mix. Original material is all well and good, but it would have been really satisfying to hear the set close with a radical take on a classic eighties pop tune. Anna suggested “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, which I think would be perfect — imagine Merrill G shrieking the lyrics over a raucous drum loop. Or how about some Michael Jackson? “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” would fit their style like a glove. Pop covers would be another way to bring in some more audience participation, since Merrill G’s knotty original stuff doesn’t facilitate much singing along.

My own preferred form of audience participation is the remix, so here’s a mashup of Tune-Yards’ “Bizness” with “Nobody Beats The Biz” by Biz Markie, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” by Kanye West and Jay-Z, “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” by Billie Holiday, “Taking Care Of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive and “Strictly Business” by EPMD. Enjoy.

Bizness megamix by ethanhein

Update: really good article discusses Merrill Garbus’ complex gender politics. Recommended.

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

“Amen, Brother” is an uptempo adaptation of “Amen” by Jester Hairston, written for the movie Lilies of the Field, and made famous by The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield, before he went solo.)

“Amen, Brother” didn’t get much attention until crate-digging hip-hop producers started sampling the drum break in the 1980s. Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Since then, the break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen shows up in rock and pop songs ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It’s in TV theme songs and commercials. Casual music listeners have probably heard it in dozens if not hundreds of recordings. Here’s a family tree showing the most noteworthy usages.

As is so often the case in sample history, GC Coleman never got a dime from any of these uses beyond his union scale for the original recording session. He died in 2006, so there’s not much we can do for him now, but I think he at least deserves some recognition.

Inside the break

Here’s the Amen break, looped four times:

Amen break by ethanhein

Wikipedia has handy drum notation and drum machine tablature for the break.

Here’s how the break looks in the sampling program Recycle:

Each blue spiky blob is a drum hit. The vertical lines are slices I added using Recycle. Once you’ve sliced up the loop, you can play the slices back in any order and any combination using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. You can generate an infinite variety of new loops this way.

Two documentaries on the Amen break

The usual reference for the Amen break is this twenty-minute video by Nate Harrison.

Here’s an hour-long podcast on the break by Crissy Criss:

Noteworthy Amen break samples

I’m not attempting anything resembling completeness here; these are just tracks I like or find interesting. Starting in the eighties with the old skool, here’s “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix.

In “I Desire,” Salt N Pepa mixes the Amen with drums from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the synth line from “Daisy Lady” by 7th Wonder.

Maybe the best-known hip-hop usage of the Amen is NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (very, very NSFW.)

The break appears in pitched-down form at the very beginning of “Informer” by Snow. What the heck is he saying in the chorus, anyway?

As I said above, the Amen is most closely associated with drum ‘n’ bass, for example “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja.

Luke Vibert did an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews where just about every song uses a variation on the Amen break.

An artsier take on the Amen: “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin.

Even artsier: Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife.”

David Bowie uses the Amen for his foray into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, “Little Wonder.” It’s not one of his strongest tunes but he gets huge points for trying.

The most current hip-hop song I could find that uses the Amen is Lupe Fiasco’s “Streets On Fire.”

Many, many more examples can be found on the Amen Break Database and Whosampled.com.

The Amen break on TV

As the Nate Harrison documentary points out, the Amen pops up in quite a few TV commercials. It’s made its way into some theme songs, too, most notably the one from Futurama:

The Amen also shows up in the Powerpuff Girls theme song.

Do you still think that sampling is stealing? I don’t mean monetarily, I mean artistically. Do you think that there’s something unoriginal in all these uses of the Amen break? Do you think that the way Aphex Twin or Lupe Fiasco recontextualizes the break is somehow a lesser creative act than getting out a drum kit and playing something? You can probably guess where I stand.

Why is the Amen break so magical?

Producers talk about how funky and passionate the Amen is, how compressed and dirty the drum sounds are, how much hip syncopation it uses in its second half. But what if there’s a mathematical explanation for the break’s popularity? Michael Schneider has a theory that the Amen Break sounds so good because it’s structured around the golden ratio.

Is there anything to this theory? You be the judge.

Try it yourself

Here’s my mashup of many of the above tracks, with heavy processing of the Amen break in Recycle and Reason.

Amen Brother megamix by ethanhein

If you want to play too, the internet is full of resequenced and reshuffled variations on the Amen break available for your downloading pleasure. Here are a hundred fifty Amen loops. Here’s another forty and yet another twenty. Stick them in your favorite audio editor and have fun!

I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful whole. The best way to get an idea of what I’m talking about is just to see the man in action.

Reggie on Conan:

“Wax and Wane,” a video by Jake Lodwick:

See a video deconstructing the process behind songs like this. The delay/looping unit is a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler.

A ballad, Big Ass Purse:

A longer performance at Google:

Reggie’s most produced video blends his usual disjointed lunacy with a loving parody of hip-hop. It’s called F*ck Sh*t Stack, and obviously, the language is very explicit. And hilarious.

Reggie works well in purely audio form too: Thus Far (Alternate) by reggiewatts

Reggie on Radiolab:

Hear many more tracks on this Spotify playlist. I’m particularly awestruck by the fifteen-minute “My History Thus Far.” It’s a wonderful autobiography unto itself, but if you want more background, check out this New York Magazine profile.

Improvised words and electronic music belong together

Barbara Singer and I had a somewhat similar idea to do completely improvised electronic music, and to combine it with improvisational comedy. Reggie’s method is better. First of all, instead of using canned beats like we did, he beatboxes everything himself. Secondly, he sticks to a pretty strict hip-hop/R&B song form: eight and sixteen bar sections, intros, verses, choruses, breakdown, outtro. The structure gives his improvisation a solid skeleton, keeping the music tightly enjoyable while the words go off in whatever random directions.

I went through my free jazz phase, but Reggie’s approach is way cooler than free jazz. Reggie is accessible and pleasurable in a way that free jazz only very rarely is. Relatedly, I like improv comedy as much as the next guy, but combining it with singing and rapping pushes it onto a completely different level. Reggie feels less like an entertainer and more like a transmitter for the collective unconscious of the culture. In a prehistoric culture he probably would have been a shaman or a prophet. It helps that he looks the part.

Studies of musicians who improvise while having their brains scanned show a connection between melodic improvisation and speech.

[Improvising] led to a surge in activity in a variety of brain areas, including parts of the premotor cortex and, most intriguingly, the inferior frontal gyrus. The premotor activity is simply an echo of execution — the novel musical patterns, after all, must still be translated by the fingers. The inferior frontal gyrus, however, has primarily been investigated for its role in language — it includes Broca’s area, which is essential for the production of speech. Why, then, is it so active when people create music on the piano? The scientists argue that expert musicians create new melodies by relying on the same mental muscles used to create a sentence; every note is another word.

Given these results, it’s not surprising to me that the richest improvisation combines music and language. The best jazz solos have a speech-like aspect. Freestyle hip-hop makes the speech-music connection literal, but suppresses melody. By combining hip-hop with melodic singing and discursive lectures, Reggie is hitting every brain region at once. When we laugh at his routines, it’s not because his stuff is “funny” in the traditional sense (though it can be.) I think we’re laughing at the delightful surprise of having so many new connections between our own brain regions being lit up at once.

So, the show we saw

Apparently it was taped for a Comedy Central special, that’s something to look forward to. As you can see in the videos, there’s a whole dance component to Reggie’s act, which includes waving his fro around hypnotically. It had been pouring buckets before the set started and it was still humid, so Reggie’s hair steamed visibly under the lights.

The beauty of the live looping is how unpredictable and context-sensitive it is. Sometimes crowd noise got recorded along with whatever Reggie was singing or beatboxing, adding to the texture. On one of the songs involving piano, he overdubbed two layers that were slightly out of sync with each other. Instead of erasing one and trying again, he just let it run, giving the piece a nice organic lopsidedness.

While most of the content came straight from Reggie’s subconscious, there was some pop culture too. He did a flawless parody of Radiohead. He shouted out nerd culture several times too, making references to rolling for initiative and Seven Of Nine. He aimed a surprisingly earnest lecture to computer hackers, entreating them to find something constructive to do.

Reggie’s best material went from the ridiculous to the sublime. He started one of his hip-hop tunes by shouting out all the boroughs – “Is Brooklyn in the house? Is Queens in the house?” That led to a rapped discourse on New York City, its neighborhoods, the way the streets down in the financial district and the Village are all oddly laid out because it was before the grid system, then the Dutch, the native Americans, the wooly mammoths, the formation of the earth, and all the way back to the big bang, which he described as “a black hole emitting radiation.” Which: wow.

In general, Reggie’s act feels like he’s explaining to aliens how humans work. I sometimes feel like that’s my job with this blog. It’s a thing with people who grow up between different cultures. In my case, it’s the conflict between my Jewish and Protestant ancestors. Reggie’s case is more complex, because he has a French mother and an African-American father. His Obama-like chameleon quality is the result of an Obama-like upbringing. He probably feels like an alien himself most of the time — too black for white people, too white for black people, too European for America, too American for Europe, too musical for straight pop, too pop for the academy. He and I share a fondness for Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” which is all about the alien perspective on humans. I bet he likes Björk’s “Human Behaviour” too.

The crowd was heavy on the hipsters, but more varied in race and class and age than you’d think. The people around me were uniformly enraptured, laughing at the random nonsequiturs, bopping to the songs. The only exception was a woman standing front and center at the foot of the stage, who abruptly stormed out two thirds of the way through the set, angrily exclaiming, “This is not funny!”

Because Alicia Keys was involved, I thought she might have written the chord progression. But no, it’s built from samples of the intro to “Love On A Two-Way Street” by The Moments.

“Empire State Of Mind” was originally written by Angela Hunte and Janet “Jnay” Sewell-Ulepic (though Jay-Z substantially rewrote the verses when he recorded it.) Their sequencing of the Moments samples seems like a different process from the way that someone like Alicia Keys would write a song at the piano. Using the sampler is a lot more limiting. But sometimes that’s good for creativity, as in this case. I like Alicia Keys’ own material okay, but she’s never written anything as powerful as “Empire.”

Let’s analyze. The Moments’ intro is in the key of F, but “Empire” speeds up the sample a little, moving it up to F#. I’m going to spare us all some annoyance and confusion by analyzing both songs as if they’re in C.

The Moments’ intro starts with a simple but beautifully voiced I-V-IV progression: C, G, F. The bass walks down from C to the B in the G chord. From there, your ear expects it to land on A minor. Instead it lands on F. There’s an A in the F chord, so it doesn’t completely fake you out. Still, your ear expects the A minor, and the F that takes it place has an implicit wistfulness.

Next there’s an F to G cadence that you expect to land on C. Instead, it lands on a dramatic and suspenseful E7, once again setting up a strong expectation of going to A minor. But the Moments fake you out yet again, by changing keys altogether when the verse starts.

There’s more than enough information in the Moments’ twenty-second intro to unpack into a full length song, and “Empire State Of Mind” does exactly that. The verses loop the C-G-F, F-G-C parts. The prechorus is the suspenseful E7 chord. The chorus is just the verse chords in a different order: F-C-G. And the bridge combines parts of the verse and the prechorus.

The song gets a lot of its power from the way the A minor chord is constantly implied but not actually stated. (It appears very briefly in the bridge, but otherwise is absent from the song.) Your mind is constantly engaged trying to fill in that missing minor. The song even feels minor, more tragic than triumphant, even though there are (basically) no minor chords in it anywhere. That’s real musicianship.

Writing a chord progression is like reaching into a box of legos and fitting the pieces together. There’s an infinite universe of possible chord combinations, but very few of those sound good, and even fewer have the kind of drama and power of “Empire State Of Mind.” Everyone writing in a particular style is drawing from the same box of legos. The artistry happens in your selection and ordering of the pieces. Once you have enough music training to be acquainted with all the legos in the box, the challenge lies in leaving stuff out.

The sampler can be a better songwriting tool than traditional instruments because its limitations encourage economy of musical means. Sitting at the piano, the temptation to resolve to A minor might be too hard to resist. But since the Moments don’t use A minor in their song, Hunt and Sewell-Ulepic can’t really use it in theirs, much to their enormous benefit. I can’t think of a better piano-based pop song than “Empire State Of Mind” in the last ten years, even though there was no piano used to write it.

It’s a common idea that sampling a song is a form of stealing, that “Empire State Of Mind” is somehow coextensive with “Love On A Two-Way Street.” But not all sample uses are created equal. The Moments’ intro was also sampled a few years ago by Asamov in their song “Supa Dynamite.”

This is a perfectly decent hip-hop track, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as “Empire State Of Mind.” Of course, these guys can’t flow like Jay-Z and they don’t have a colossal hook sung by Alicia Keys, but the track itself is weaker too. It just loops the C-G-F, F-G-C part. It doesn’t use the E7 and doesn’t shuffle the pieces around. Asamov drew from the same box of legos as Hunt and Sewell-Ulepic. They just didn’t build something as interesting.

The track isn’t so much a song as it is an early mashup. Just about everything in it is a sample or quote. Here are the sources:

• The eighties version of the Doctor Who theme music
• “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” by Gary Glitter
• “Blockbuster!” by Sweet
• “Let’s Get Together Tonite” by Steve Walsh

Drummond and Cauty formed the KLF with the specific intent to thumb their nose at the concepts of ownership and copyright. Nevertheless, by the time of “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” they had attained enough commercial success that that they were able to license all of their samples and quotes. In spite of their not owning much of the publishing rights to their song, Drummond and Cauty ended up making over a million pounds from it. Not bad for a few days’ work. With a modern laptop and Pro Tools the track probably would have taken them twenty minutes.

“Doctorin’ The Tardis” was hot for a very brief instant in the UK, and an even briefer one here in America. I heard it on the radio probably once, after which I went around in an agony of frustration at never being able to track it down and hear it again. What I wouldn’t have given in the eighth grade for the internet. At the time, Doctor Who was a very fringe, very nerdy taste. Even the Trekkies looked down on Doctor Who fans.

Much as I love their one hit and their overall concept, I can’t say I’m too wild about the rest of the KLF’s music that I’ve heard. The only other track of theirs that really does it for me is another crazy mashup, “Whitney Joins The JAMS,” which combines “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “The Theme From Shaft” and the Mission: Impossible theme.

Also, Jimmy Cauty later went on to form The Orb, whose music I love as music and not just conceptually.

After their trip to the top of the charts, the KLF went on to write “The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.” It’s an excellent guide to the production of electronic music generally. I was tempted to just paste the whole thing in, but that would have been ridiculous, so here are some choice quotes, along with my responses.

The emotional appetite that chart pop satisfies is constant. The hunger is forever. What does change is the technology this is always on the march. At some point in the future science will develop a commodity that will satisfy this emotional need in a more efficient way.

Hopefully something more participatory, interactive and gamelike?

To make pop music, you don’t need a band. You need a programmer.

Just after 1 pm Tuesday telephone the studio that you have booked and tell them you are going to need someone who can programme, ideally a programmer who can play the keyboards. Every studio can get one for you. This programmer is going to be the person who will provide, sample, originate, compute, even play all the music you will need on your record.

In hip-hop terms, this person is known as the beatmaker. The word producer is also sometimes loosely used for programmers/beatmakers.

The process of sequencing a pop or dance track is more like methodically cooking a meal or building a building than a wild Dionysian outburst.

It is going to be a construction job, fitting bits together. You will have to find the Frankenstein in you to make it work. Your magpie instincts must come to the fore. If you think this just sounds like a recipe for some horrific monster, be reassured by us, all music can only be the sum or part total of what has gone before. Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

Creators of music who desperately search for originality usually end up with music that has none because no room for their spirit has been left to get through. The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music.

Can I get an amen!

Inexperienced songwriters start with lyrics, treating the rest of the song as decoration. This is like building a house and starting with the wallpaper. Wiser songwriters start with a melody or chord progression, and the wisest ones start with the groove, the foundation of any musical structure:

Before we go any further we had better define “groove”. It is basically the drum and bass patterns and all the other musical sounds on the record that are neither hummable or singalongable to. Groove is the underlying sex element of the record and we are afraid for U.K. Number Ones this can never be left too rabidly raw on the 7″ format. It upsets our subliminal national moral code. We can cope with smut but not grind.

America is a little looser in this regard, but raw beats still make many of my fellow white people anxious.

In the same way that our sexual fantasies change and develop, sometimes double back over a period of months, so do our dance floor tastes in groove. It is always on the move, searching for the ultimate turn on and when you are almost there it’s off again and you’re left looking for a new direction.

Black American records have always been the most reliable source of dance groove. These records down through the years have inevitably laid so much emphasis on the altar of groove and so very little into fulfilling the other Golden Rules that they very rarely break through into the U.K. Top Ten, let alone making the Number One spot. A by-product of this situation is that gangsters of the groove from Bo Diddley on down believe they have been ripped off, not only by the business but by all the artists that have followed on from them. This is because the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

The best place to find the groove that 7″ single buyers will want to be tapping their toes to in three months time is to get down to the hippest club in your part of the country that is playing import American black dance records. The unknown track the DJ plays that gets both the biggest response on the floor and has you joining the throng will have the groove you are looking for…

If there is neither a suitable club or specialist dance shop in your part of the country don’t throw in the towel as this is where the dance music compilations we have instructed you to buy on Monday morning come in. Stick them on the record player, turn it up loud and get lost in the groove, leave your mind on the bookshelf where it belongs, feel yourself if need be but keep going until you “feel the force” and you are “lost in music”, when the only answer to the question “can you feel it” is “yes”.

Pure dance music, if it has any lyrical content at all, will only deal in the emotions experienced within the four walls of a club late at night; basically desire and, more importantly, that area which is beyond desire at the very centre of the Human Psyche. Everything else is meaningless. Any creator of pure dance music that is attempting to communicate any other subject should be treated with deep suspicion. With a danger of getting too carried away on our own pretensions we state that it is through dance music and dancing we are able to get momentarily back to the Garden. Of course, in the clear light of day this is all very silly.

Not so silly, to my mind.

After the groove, the next key structural element is song structure. Like groove, it acts on your unconscious powerfully.

As we have already mentioned, the Golden Rule for a classic Number One single is intro, verse one, chorus one, verse two, chorus two, breakdown section, double chorus, outro.

Each of these sections will be made up of bars in groupings of multiples of four. So you might have an intro containing four bars, a verse sixteen bars and a chorus eight bars. At times the first verses can be double length verses, or the second chorus a double length. These sort of decisions are not going to have to be finally made until you reach the mixing stage of the record, when the engineer will have to start editing the whole track to make it work in the most concise and exciting way possible within three minutes and thirty seconds.

This last part is no longer strictly true. Pro Tools grid mode and MIDI editors make song-structural editing as easy as editing text in a word processor. You can work out structure in the midst of the recording/songwriting itself.

Hopefully, at sometime over the remaining days of the week, you will have been able to get out to a club and found the groove you need, been able to buy it on vinyl and get it home. It has to be the 12″ version as this will have whole great tracts of raw groove where each of the component parts of the groove are broken down and left exposed for your engineer and programmer to study and imitate when it comes to recording your record.

Again, the computer makes this easier. You can effortlessy loop a bar or two of any recording. Dance mixes do make it easier to find loop-worthy grooves, though.

The next thing you have got to have is a chorus. The chorus is the bit in the song that you can’t help but sing along with. It is the most important element in a hit single because it is the part that most people carry around with them in their head, when there is no radio to be heard, no video on TV, and they are far from the dance floor. It’s the part that nags you while day dreaming in the classroom or at work or as you walk down the street to sign on. It’s the part that finally convinces the punters to make that trip down to the record shop and buy it.

In other words, the chorus contains the meme, the earworm, the mind virus. Your conscious mind is not your friend when it comes time to grow a new meme. You need to reach behind it, into the more evolutionarily ancient and intuitive brain systems.

So, slip on the 12″ or your dance compilation and sing along with the breakdown sections; any old words will do, just whatever comes out of your mouth. If you have difficulty in forming a tune in your head or you feel a bit inhibited, flick through your copy of the Guinness Book of Hits and pick any Top Five record that takes your fancy and see if you can sing the chorus of it along to the track.

Take for example:

“That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha”

by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. That one usually works and should get you going in the right direction but there are hundreds to choose from.

The lyrics for the chorus must never deal with anything but the most basic of human emotions. This is not us trying to be cynical in a clever sort of way when we say “stick to the cliches”. The cliches are the cliches because they deal with the emotional topics we all feel. No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever or deal in strange and new ideas. In fact, the lyrics can be quite meaningless in a literal sense but still have a great emotional pull. An obvious example of this was the chorus of our own record:

“Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, in the Tardis Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who”

Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap. A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The Top for more than one week.

Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7″ single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over – the Number One position was guaranteed:

“I’m never going to give you up”

It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

“I’m never gonna let you down I’m never going to fool around or upset you”

GENIUS.

Michael Jackson may be the biggest singing star in the world. Sold more L.P.s than any other artist at any time in the history of pop but he has had very few U.K. Number Ones. If he would like to make amends on this front he should start co-writing with the SAW team or read this manual. He has quite a bit to learn about the opening line of a chorus.

Did these guys just compare Michael Jackson unfavorably to Rick Astley? Did I really just get rickrolled in a book written in 1988? That takes chutzpah.

We are afraid you can’t just go down to the local supermarket and listen to the check-out girls’ talk and hope you can pick up the right line before Waterman gets to it. The line has to come to you and when it does you’ve got to grab it. Mindlessly singing along to the 12″ groove track you have is the best way.

The routine practice now is to record this mindless improvisation into the computer. If something valuable tumbles out, you can easily grab it, copy and paste it and build the song around it.

You must be worrying by now how you, or if not you, who on earth is going to front this record! If you already think you are a great singer and a well happening front person, then we have a problem. It means you will have the sort of ego that will render it totally impossible for you to be objective about everything else that has got to be done. Singers have historically made the worst producers of their own work. The reason for this is simply that singers have to become so emotionally involved in their performance it cancels out any sort of over view. At the very least they need a musical partner that can give them some direction. If a singer was able to have this calculated view of their own work the end product would undoubtedly come over as cold and empty.

This is profoundly true. Singers like to mix vocals way out in front, with the instrumental track as a distant accompaniment. This sounds super corny and dated. Cool music puts the beat up front.

The club D.J. (like his forerunner the dance band leader of the thirties, forties and fifties) realises that the most important thing is keeping the dance floor full and the thing that keeps the dancers dancing now (as it was then) is the music with its underpinning groove factor. Singing throughout has always just provided a distraction from the main event – what is happening on the dance floor and not on the stage.

Music that’s meant to be listened to alone can be lyrics-oriented and built around a vocal sound. But social music needs to center on the beat.

For the majority of people the sound of the vocals and the words that are being sung throughout the verses just merge into the over all sound of the track. The words that are being sung could be any old gibberish, only the words to the chorus have any real importance. Of course there are the exceptions when the classic narrative song breaks through and storms the Number One slot These can never be planned and I’m sure the performers of these freak hits are as surprised as anybody when it happens. So unless you want to risk everything on some bizarre tale you have to tell, stick with us.

Michael Jackson’s lyrics are usually totally incomprehensible, which is no obstacle to their enjoyment. It’s nice to have a blank slate to project your own imagination of the song onto.

So now you can tackle the construction of the verse without worrying about singers.

Using the basic groove you have decided upon you are now going to have to choose a bass line that will work as the basis for the whole song, or at least the verse sections. We take it there is no point in us trying to describe what the bass line is in any great detail, but it’s the bit in the record that throbs and keeps the flow going. In days gone by it was provided by the bass guitar player, now it is all played by the programmed keyboards. Even if you want it to sound like a real bass guitar, a sampled sound of a bass guitar will be used, then programmed. It’s easier than getting some thumb-slapping dick head in.

The groove might already have a killer bass line in there, making the whole thing happen and to remove it and exchange it for another might destroy what you have already got. There are plenty of monster bass lines out there to try. You will know them, they are the ones that you can almost hum. The great thing about bass lines is that they are in public domain. Nobody, even if they do recognise it, will seriously accuse you of ripping somebody else’s bass line off.

Michael Jackson, who we cited earlier on for not being that adept at coming up with the killer Number One hit choruses, CAN come up with the bass lines. “Billie Jean” was the turning point in Jackson’s career. That song, on his own admission, took him into the mega stratospheres where his myth now reigns. The fact is, “Billie Jean” would be nothing without that lynx-on-the-prowl bass line; but he wasn’t the first to use it. It had been featured in numerous dance tracks by various artists before him. Jackson and Quincy must have been hanging out around the pool table in their air conditioned dimmed light atmosphere, L.A. studio one evening wondering: “What next?” when one of them came up with the idea of using the old lynx- on-the-prowl standby. Without making that decision back in 1981 there would have been no Pepsi Cola sponsored jamboree in 1988.

We are not trying to deny any of the very real talent that Jackson has, just trying to emphasise the possible importance of the killer bass line.

Serious groove merchants hate it when a song has a dynamite bass line for the verse and then when the chorus comes the chords change, dragging the bass away from its “bad self” into having to follow those limp wristed chords. For them the whole movement of the song is destroyed for the sake of some nursery rhyme element they would rather see dumped.

Somehow these two important elements are going to have to be made to work together without the power of the chorus or the propulsion of verse bass riff being destroyed. Ideally, when a song hits its chorus it should feel it’s the natural thing to happen, a release from the tension of the verse. By the end of the chorus you must feel like nothing is desired more than to slide back down into the vice-like grip of the bass line.

Some groove merchants have a talent for getting it all their own way by coming up with a bass riff that never shifts from the beginning of the song until the end: intro, choruses, verses, breakdowns, outro all fitting around the same bass riff. For a song to sound like this and work away from the confines of the dance floor, it is going to have to be a real mutha of a riff. There must be some pretty insistent action going on on top of it to keep the casual radio listener interested. Even on “Billie Jean” they moved off the bass riff for the chorus.

Actually, the prechorus. But point taken.

Drummond and Cauty have a ton of other good songwriting advice. Like, don’t use a bridge, use a breakdown section instead. This breakdown section should be just the rhythm tracks with some ambiance on top, not a solo, because:

Nowadays, solos either get in the way or have to be fabulously stunning at the same time as being able to fit in with the studio sculpting that is going on around it. Having some guitarist give you his interpretation of what a really good guitar solo should sound like is totally out of the question. Guitar solos only work in modern pop records when they are over the top things full of hideous histrionics and lacking in any emotional depth whatsoever. This type of guitar solo is one of the very few things that heavy metal has given back to Top Ten chart music. Yet again, Jackson’s name comes in here. It all started when he used Eddie Van Halen on the “Thriller” L.P. So unless you have a mate that can play just like Eddie – forget it.

The only other reason for having a meaningless solo on your track is to give the record some instant profile upon the record’s release by making it known in the media that it features a boring but sainted muso, thus giving it some fake cred. The tried and tested guest soloists of the late eighties are: Miles Davis on trumpet, Courtney Pine on saxophone and Stevie Wonder on harmonica. Untried possibilities that might create some interest would be Jimmy Page or Junior Walker. But really we would recommend you don’t bother – unless you can get Jimi Hendrix to do it.

Finally, here’s a perfect description of how the production process feels at its best:

From now on in you will begin to feel the inevitable pull of the unseen life force of the record you have allowed to be created. It will be as if you are in a sailing boat and suddenly from nowhere a wisp of wind fills the sails. Your job is to hold onto the rudder and at all times never lose sight of the harbour lights. Let the crew bail out the water. Let the crew trim the sails. Let the crew man the galley. Remember, if you ever leave go of the rudder to help the crew all hands may be lost – along with any chance of ever hearing your record being played at five minutes to seven on Radio One on a Sunday evening.

Very zen. Very true.

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!

There’s something in the cumulative experience of a loop that makes it greater than the sum of the individual listens. Good loops create a meditative, trance-like state, like Buddhist mantras you can dance to. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s the right groove, there’s no such thing as too much repetition. Take “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.

At the end, they repeat “Naah, na na nanana naah, nanana naah, hey Jude” over and over for four minutes. I could listen to it for forty minutes. Why don’t I get bored? Each time through, the chant affects me a little differently. The forty-third time through might be musically indistinguishable from the forty-second but it feels different. My attention drifts and snaps back in. There’s a feeling of tension through each group of four or eight that gets resolved on the first repetition in the next phrase. A cumulative tension builds across all the repetitions.

Some western listeners get anxious from this tension. I’ve seen loops make people surprisingly angry. The loop reaches deep into the brain stem, and not everybody likes having their consciousness altered so heavily. I’ve also seen loops bring groups of people into ecstatic states with an afterglow lasting for days, weeks, even months.

Loops make me happy

In retrospect, I look back at stuff I liked the best instinctively before I was a musician, still just a fan, and what ties it all together is loop-oriented structures.

• Riff-based Ellington, Monk and Coltrane tunes
• “Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads
• “Not Fade Away” and “Fire On The Mountain” by the Grateful Dead
• “Stir It Up” by Bob Marley
• “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” by Michael Jackson
• Everything by Run-DMC
• The first few minutes of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock

On paper, these tunes are all very boring pieces of music. But living in my ears, they’re bottomlessly gratifying.

People with a casual relationship to music tend to enjoy loop-based material, especially on the dance floor. But many if not most of the trained musicians I’ve worked with are resistant to the loop. Whether they come from jazz or classical, schooled musicians tend to equate quality with complexity, density and unpredictability. This to me is one of the great pathologies afflicting the music academy. Making good music takes a lot of study and focus, but that’s different from effort. Some of the best music is easy. After struggling with all the intricacies of music theory, we musicians get too suspicious of simple truths. That suspicion gets in the way of our main job of connecting to listeners and making their lives more bearable.

A few years ago I went to hear a highly respected quartet led by a saxophonist who the jazz nerds speak of in hushed tones. I got to the club early enough to catch the soundcheck. While the sound guy fiddled with levels, the band played an open-ended funk groove on one chord. It was exhilarating: the loose interplay between the band members was anchored by the straightforward groove to make a satisfyingly tight sonic knot. I was all excited for the actual set, which turned out to be… a snooze. The material was full of startling key and time signature changes at unpredictable intervals. The band maneuvered through these sonic mazes masterfully, and I’m sure they enjoyed themselves, but for me it was like watching someone else play a difficult video game. And these are jazz musicians, supposedly the warm, emotionally connected wing of intellectual music. The situation is even worse in the classical world.

All music is based on repetition

The definition of a rhythm is a patterned sound that repeats (or, for that matter, any patterned event that repeats.) Pitched sounds are produced by regular sine-wave vibrations as an air column’s pressure cycles back and forth.

Repetition and recursion

Nearly all world music uses repeating phrases grouped into longer phrases, and groups those metaphrases into meta-metaphrases. Entire sections get repeated to form still higher level structures. For my ears, the most satisfying music is the most modular and recursive.

Loops and thermodynamics

Repeated events are surprising because they’re thermodynamically improbable. Usually the rock falls off the mountain and just sits there. For the rock to roll around and around in a circle, some unusual force must be driving it. When we come across something improbable, we instinctively want to find a meaning for it. Symmetrical repetition creates structure and gratifies our pattern-recognition systems, the same ones that enjoy parsing out the meaning of a text or the rules of a video game.

Structure acts very strongly on our emotions, often without our realizing why. One reason the Beatles and Michael Jackson sell so many more records than their seemingly equally talented peers is their mastery of structured repetition. Their best work repeats phrases exactly the right number of times, in exactly the right sequence. This aspect of songwriting is harder to quantify in rule sets than rhythm or harmony, but that hasn’t stopped the music industry from trying. Here’s an excerpt of an entertaining McSweeney’s series, Dispatches From a Guy Trying Unsuccessfully to Sell a Song In Nashville by Charlie Hopper.

To me, it appears that Music Row’s devotion to form and formula is not strictly venal. It’s just the smartest way to send a song into the Machine without you being there to defend it. “The first rule of songwriting is, there are no rules,” Barbara Cloyd, a Songwriting Tutor, likes to declare at the outset of her class. Then she takes a fairly deep breath: “Having said that…”

And she goes on to explain the three or four acceptable formulas.
It all proceeds from the notion that there are basic truths about how people like to get information. Barbara quotes someone she knows as saying, “We like to hear something, then hear it again. Then we want to hear something different for a while. After that, we’re ready to hear the first thing again.”

That would be Verse Chorus, Verse Chorus, Bridge, Verse Chorus.

I knew John spoke the Universal Language of Beatles. “So the basic formula is like, oh, ‘Ticket to Ride.’ Or ‘Day Tripper.’”

I might have been a little didactic. “Then, if you want, you can start with two verses. That gives you an option to have one or two verses after the first chorus. But you never put two verses after the first chorus unless you had two at the beginning. That screws with the formula.”

John was laughing and shaking his head in a way that meant he couldn’t believe I had bought into this seriously.

“Like ‘Yellow Submarine,’” I said. “Two verses, chorus, one verse, chorus, the farting around in a submarine during the bridge, verse, chorus. Actually, the bridge is optional. I’ve heard publishers say, ‘Do you really need a bridge here? There’s no new information in it…’”

The other form that’s generally acceptable, though less prized because it has no soaring chorus, is the “A A B A” form. The hook comes as the end line of each A section. It might show up at the end of the B section, but doesn’t have to. Most songs that are written with no thought of formula tend to be in this form. “Yesterday” is A A B A. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is. “Girl” is. Most Bob Dylan songs are.

Repetitive music teaches itself to you as you listen

Repetition creates familiarity, which is a prerequisite to emotional connection. Cognitive scientists use the word “rehearsal” to describe the process by which the brain learns through repeated exposure to the same stimulus. As they like to say, neurons that fire together wire together. Repetitive music builds rehearsal in, making it more accessible and inclusive.

Africa vs Europe

In America, our musical culture is a hybrid of mostly western European, African and Caribbean traditions. Our musical ancestors have some philosophical differences around repetition. The western European classical music term for a continually repeated phrase is an ostinato, from the Italian word for “stubborn.” It’s related to the English word obstinate. This is not an attractive quality in a person and the European classical world doesn’t think too highly of it as a quality of music either. Theodor Adorno criticized the repetitiveness of popular music as being “psychotic and infantile.” He was outspokenly contemptuous of jazz and dance music generally. From his book Prisms:

Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhabitation, as within an articulate language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas, and cliches to the exclusion of everything else.

Adorno is factually correct. But he’s wrong that this is a defect of the music. The tricks, formulas and cliches are the basic grammar of pleasure. Cooking tofu with sesame oil, ginger and soy sauce is a cliche too, and for good reason, it consistently makes the tofu taste good.

Fortunately, we in America are blessed with the strong African and Caribbean influences, and the musicians of these cultures hold circularity as a high virtue. To pick one example out of a vast many, Fela Kuti’s “Beasts Of No Nation” repeats the chords G minor to F for about half an hour. It doesn’t get old.

Sample-based hip-hop is the music most exciting my ears right now. The best beatmakers find fragments that were part of a linear stream and bend them into unexpected loops.

I don’t know the provenance of this RZA quote beyond wikipedia, but it’s a good one:

For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo, you’re going to have some nice music man, you’re going to have a nice hip hop track.

This is good advice for any musician, not just hip-hop beatmakers.