I made some music using modes of the harmonic series

It’s a cliche to say that the harmonic series is the basis of all of music. It is true that the first five harmonics are the basis of Western tuning. The first seven harmonics are a possible basis for the blues. You don’t tend to hear much music based on the higher harmonics, but they can be a great way to build exotic scales that still have a feeling of coherence and order.

 

Here are some tracks I made using the pitch ratios derived from the first forty-three natural harmonics.

I made this music using Ableton Live and a tuning plugin called MTS-ESP. I got it so I could try out historical tuning systems, first for my own understanding, and then for teaching music theory. While I was experimenting with the software, I started plugging in weird scales of my own invention. To understand what I was doing, you need to know a little math.

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Morning Dew

Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending collapse of American democracy. But those missiles are all still there! The Grateful Dead ended a lot of their sets with a tune about what it would be like the day after the missiles launched. That is not the expected way to close out a set of hedonistic hippie rock.

This t-shirt is funny, but the song itself is pretty extraordinarily horrifying. In a good way!

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Starfish and Coffee

My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually:

According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from real life, except for Cynthia’s preferred breakfast, which was actually starfish and pee-pee. That was a little too much even for Prince, though.

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Jacob Collier’s four magical chords

Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.”

The most remarkable part of this arrangement comes between the third and fourth verses, when Collier modulates from the key of E to the key of G half-sharp. That’s the key which is halfway between G and G-sharp. Modulating there is a bananas thing to do!

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Blues for the Jews

December is always a complex month for half-Jewish mutts like me. When pressured to self-identify, I usually just go with “Jewish” for the sake of simplicity, but this is in spite of not having being bar mitzvahed, not knowing any Hebrew, having only the vaguest idea what all the holidays and rituals mean, and having no relationship whatsoever with God.

My mom is Jewish, so that’s enough for the tribe to have welcomed me as one of their own, but it’s a complex question as to what that membership means. Wikipedia has two separate articles for Judaism and Jews, to distinguish the religion from the ethnicity, and I definitely belong to the ethnicity more than the religion.

My most significant personal connection to the tribe, aside from family Passover seders and Seinfeld appreciation, has come through music, specifically klezmer music. I may not know my way around the Torah, but I know my harmonic minor modes inside and out.

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Tommy The Cat

Tommy

[audio:http://www.ethanhein.com/music/Revival_Revival_Tommy.mp3]

Revival Revival vs Primus

mp3 download, ipod format download

Vocals by Barbara Singer. Samples and programming by me. The guitar licks were originally played by Alex Torovic but have been chopped up pretty dramatically. This is part of our ongoing strategy, learned from hip-hop, of taking a familiar chorus and coming up with new verses.

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Blue notes and other microtones

Update: here’s a deeper and better-informed explanation of blue notes.

Blue notes are a big part of what makes the blues sound like the blues. Most other American vernacular music uses blue notes too: jazz, funk, rock, country, gospel, folk and so on. In the video below, John Lee Hooker hits a blue note in just about every single guitar phrase.

For such a foundational element of America’s music, there’s a surprising amount of confusion as to what a blue note is exactly. So allow me to clear it up: a blue note is a microtonal pitch in between a note from the blues scale and a neighboring note from the major scale.

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