The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common ancestor, all human music has a shared origin in the calls of our primate forebears.
Posts Tagged ‘midi’
Songwriting and genealogy
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
The case for sampling, and copyleft generally
Monday, February 8th, 2010My friend Adam, a non-musician but devoted music fan, asked me why sampling is good. He’s used to hearing me defend it from the idea that it’s bad, but he’d never heard a positive argument for it. In case you’ve ever asked the same question, here’s my answer.
Imogen Heap and artificial harmony
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010Here’s a live rendition of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide And Seek.” It’s introduced by Zach Braff, but don’t let that dissuade you from watching.
Resequencing the Funky Drummer’s DNA
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware samplers and turntables.
To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.
Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.
Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.
Good old Grateful Dead
Monday, October 12th, 2009I’m producing some tracks for a singer-songwriter named Geoff. He’s having me play some acoustic guitar parts in a country-rock style. I play this kind of material exactly like Jerry Garcia would. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. It’s not about drugs. I’ve never tripped on anything. I really did like the music, a lot.
Game controllers as musical instruments
Friday, August 21st, 2009This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller.
Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.
The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.
Tuning systems, jigsaw puzzles, Giant Steps and Tetris
Friday, August 14th, 2009Expanding on “Learning Music Theory With Autotune”
If you’re a science geek and you find yourself in San Francisco, the most fun thing to do there is to go to the Exploratorium.
Sampling keybs
Friday, August 7th, 2009One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator II, and plays them back to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz. The exact same technology is used on the soundtrack by Yello for their song “Oh Yeah.”
Vocalist Dieter Meier recorded the words “oh oh, chicka chicka” and “oh yeah” at a relatively normal pitch into the sampler, and keyboardist Boris Blank played them back lower and slowed down. There are also some cool sampled Tarzan yells and Lord Of The Rings synthesized men’s chorus. This track could have been recorded last week.