Thursday, December 8, 2011
Draw a lot. Don’t be precious about materials. Don’t use fancy art board or moleskines. Get a big newsprint pad or a stack of cheap legal pads from Staples. You want to draw as much and as quickly as possible, without being worried about wasting expensive paper. Draw fearlessly. Use a pen or Sharpie. No [...]
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter describes and defines the concept of recursion, and discusses its applications in computer science, consciousness, art, music, biology and various other fields. 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.
Filed in Math, Music, Writing
|
Also tagged anthills, bach, books, buddhism, computer science, douglas hofstadter, emergence, escher, fractals, godel, looping, recursion, Sampling, xkcd
|
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
When teaching guitar, I find that my students need the most help with groove. Students come to me expecting to learn chords, scales, riffs and ultimately entire tunes. I do teach those things, but after a little guidance, anyone can learn them on their own just as well from books, videos, web sites and so [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
|
Also tagged attention, funk, funky drummer, groove, guitar, hip-hop, linkedin, rhythm, swing, time
|
The other day Brian Eno was on NPR talking about his process. He likes to have people walk into the studio without any preconceived ideas or written out material. Then he has the musicians improvise within certain constraints. Usually these constraints are more about a mood or a vibe than a particular musical structure. After [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music
|
Also tagged brian eno, buddhism, comedy, electronica, groovebox, guitar, Improvisation, intuition, revival revival, singing, upright citizens brigade
|
In Annie Hall, young Woody Allen explains to his doctor that he won’t do his homework because the universe is expanding, so what’s the point? His mother exasperatedly tells him, “You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!” I post this because I’ve been reading Coming Of Age In The Milky Way by Tim Ferris, [...]
Life appeared very early in the planet’s history, earlier than you might have naively guessed. But then for billions of years, it existed only as simple single cells floating in the ocean or sitting in cracks in the rocks. Big complex creatures visible to the naked eye didn’t appear until the planet was two-thirds of [...]
Filed in Evolution
|
Also tagged biology, birds, emergence, Evolution, fish, mammals, microbes, reptiles, space, time, wikipedia
|
“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads and Brian Eno is one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
|
Also tagged attention, beatles, brian eno, david byrne, Improvisation, mixing, philosophy, Recording, recursion, reggae, remixes, sly and the family stone, talking heads, tape, tape editing, time
|
Here’s a more specific post on programming various well-known beats. The brain is a pattern recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry. But we only like it up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Music Teaching
|
Also tagged dance, drum machines, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, looping, Music, programming, questlove, recursion, repetition, rhythm, time
|
When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?