A little background. I got my first Mac exposure in 1988, eighth grade, back in the days of System 6 and Pagemaker 1.0. It was love at first use. The mouse interface is old hat now but then it was a tremendous improvement on typing arcane DOS commands.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a blue and white G3 tower.

This computer was an amazing piece of industrial design. The side panel was a big hinged door so you could effortlessly open the computer up and access its innards. Not like I needed access to the guts all that often, but it was nice to not need a screwdriver or anything when I did. I also really loved having big sturdy handles on all four corners. It seems like such a no-brainer now, I wish all heavy, delicate and expensive objects had big handles on them. One of my roommates at the time said I shouldn’t buy this computer because, while it looked cool, it would be instantly dated – so late nineties. She was right, but I think the time-period specificity is part of the coolness, like the fins on a 1957 Chevy.

I resisted the iPhone for a long time because of the price and the lousy AT&T phone service. My mom generously bought me one for my last birthday, though, which was especially fortuitous, since a few weeks later, my laptop’s motherboard died. The iPhone turns out to be such an awesome computer in its own right that while I haven’t been able to replace my laptop, I’ve been getting along quite well without it.

The iPhone isn’t a perfect computer. The lack of multitasking is annoying (though this is supposedly about to change.) It would be nice to have access to the file system without having to go through the rigmarole of jailbreaking. But these complaints feel trivial given how fundamentally miraculous the iPhone is. It feels like it fell out of the future, and it hasn’t been far from my hand since I got it. And I appreciate the move away from the tired desktop metaphor.

So. The iPad.

On the one hand, you have fanboys like Steven Fry proclaiming the pad to be the second coming. On the other hand, there’s the well-documented Reality Distortion Field that makes people think they like Apple’s stuff more than they actually do. I fall in between. The most reasonable review I’ve come across is the one from Daring Fireball. After a glowing review of the user experience of Apple’s iWork office apps, there’s this caveat:

There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing.

Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep.

What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.

The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac:

1. Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad.
2. Open the file on my Mac and make changes.
3. Save.
4. Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB.
5. Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad.
6. Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app.
7. Sync.

Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’ “My Documents”.

And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertently make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document.

 

This sounds like a colossal drag and it’s reason enough for me not to be interested in buying an iPad. I don’t mind the klutziness of iTunes syncing on the iPhone, since I’m not doing a lot of serious document creation on it anyway. But on a full-sized computer, I’d expect to be able to do real work on it, not just watch movies and read magazines. I’d like to be able to easily print, too.

I use the computer for routine web browsing and entertainment like everyone else. But I work on it too, and what I love most about it is how it enables experimentation, mental adventure, self-expression. At its best, Apple knows how to encourage experiential learning and creativity. The last couple of Macs I bought came free with OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, both of which I love to distraction. They inspired my sample maps and the macro-scale structure of my book in progress, respectively. I’ll bet the iPad version of OmniGraffle is a major delight… until it’s time to move your files to another computer, or print them, or do anything else with them.

I’m also disturbed by the iPad’s lack of USB ports. I can imagine a lot of awesome uses for the iPad in music, but if I can’t connect my gear to it except through a proprietary port that may or may not be supported by the makers of my other stuff, what good is it? There are plenty of intriguing music apps on the iPad, like Smule’s delightful Magic Piano. But if I make something cool with one of these apps, how do I get it out of the iPad? How do I make mp3s and put them on my web site, or export audio to Pro Tools, or do anything else with it?

Apple’s supposed concern with user experience only extends to a point. Right now, just about every video and most of the animation on the internet uses Flash. For reasons of corporate strategy, Apple has decided to not support Flash on the iPhone or iPad. So a huge percentage of web sites are missing their multimedia content, and instead show a picture of a mysterious blue lego block. I know the back story behind this functionality failure and can work around it, but most people will just find it mystifying. I don’t like Flash any more than Steve Jobs does, and I’d welcome a future without it. I guess I can understand the decision not to support it, but I’m mystified as to why Apple wouldn’t offer any onscreen explanation as to what’s going on.

Both the iPhone and the iPad are missing the most significant piece of interface friendliness that I can think of: an easy and obvious way to undo your last action. Novice users need undo even more than I do. The iPad’s Undo command is buried in the secondary onscreen keyboard and it’s totally absent on the iPhone. There’s a weird and not widely known feature of both phone and pad where you can undo by shaking the device. I rarely remember this exists and I can’t imagine how, like, my mom would ever think to do this gesture. Where’s the big red physical undo button? Come to think of it, why doesn’t every computer have one?

Apple’s handholding can be helpful, but when it interferes, it’s as annoying as Microsoft’s animated paperclip. Like, on the iPhone the automated typing correction changes “its” to “it’s” in every circumstance, whether it’s correct or not. There’s no way to create exceptions to the rules and I finally had to turn the autocorrect off entirely.

Finally, I’m concerned byApple’s less-than-stellar environmental record. I’d wish for them to get to work on that.

So. No iPad for me yet. But Apple is full of surprises, and I’m keeping an open mind.

From left to right, you’re seeing an Mbox, the audio interface that goes with Pro Tools. We plug the vocal mic into it so that the computer can perform its magic, like Auto-tune and compression. Next is a little mixer sitting on top of a headphone amp. Then there’s Babsy’s laptop running one of our Pro Tools files, showing some of the backing vocals she’ll be singing over. On the right is a Line 6 Pod, a guitar effects unit and amp modeler. It’s a lot easier to carry to gigs than a real amp. Using a fake amp modeler isn’t very rock and roll but it fits perfectly with the spirit of electronica. For the show we’re going to use two computers, Barbara’s to run Pro Tools, and mine for Reason synths and playback of ordinary audio files.

Using canned tracks causes me some residual philosophical angst. It lacks the risk-taking that jazz-trained cats like me associate with a good live performance. But sonically, accompanying ourselves with stuff we prerecorded and sequenced is a no-brainer. We want the tracks to sound a certain way. Doing our synth and sample-based sounds completely live would be either difficult or impossible. So our show is taking on the aspect of a highly skilled karaoke experience. This runs directly against the spirit of rock, jazz, country and most of the other music I’m trained in. But it fits in well with the music I’ve become most interested in lately, hip-hop, contemporary R&B and electronica. All of these styles use recordings in live performance heavily.

I’ve had a few different bands with Barbara at this point. We started out doing live techno remixes of pop and rock songs, mostly using preprogrammed beats. Then we entered our free improv period, combining a groovebox and live instrumentation to do a more electronic version of seventies Miles Davis. Now we’re back to pop, using very tightly structured songs with meticulous arrangements. We still use loose improvisation as a way to write during the recording process, but the finished product gets heavily edited, and most of the improv winds up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. I love improvising without a net in front of an audience, but the supply and demand equation for that kind of music isn’t too favorable. That’s as it should be. Unstructured jamming is more fun for the performers than the listeners, and our focus now is on making sure the audience has a good time. If you’re in NYC this Saturday night, come on down! We promise it’ll be fun on wheels.

Infrared Roses is a better idea in concept than execution. Freeform electronic improv is a great idea in the right hands, but sadly by this point in their career the Dead were just fooling idly around. Still, Infrared Roses has some moments of sonic intrigue, and I’ve pulled a few interesting samples out of the noodly morass. It inspired me to do some freeform electronica improvising of my own, though I preferred to do it over four-on-the-floor dance beats.

While the Dead didn’t do anything too musically exciting with their gadgets, just the fact of them was eye-opening for me. It was fun to hear Jerry play synth flute and such via MIDI guitar. His playing was a lot more adventurous back in the sixties by feeding back his regular old guitar Hendrix-style, but the MIDI sound had its own charm. Real guitar nerds will enjoy this exhaustive rundown of every guitar Jerry ever performed or recorded with.

The Dead’s actual music didn’t sound much like the hip-hop and electronica I mostly prefer now. But there were some formal similarities. One of my favorite aspects of DJ music is the seamless transitioning between songs. At their best, the Dead performed some nice transitions of their own, some planned, some spontaneous. These transitions became integral to the Dead’s repertoire, which came to revolve around suites like Scarlet Begonias -> Fire On The Mountain. The most exciting transitions were the spontaneous ones, as songs dissolved into a freeform jam that coalesced unexpectedly into new songs. My favorite of these is from 9/27/72 at the Stanley Theater, when they segued smoothly from Dark Star into Cumberland Blues.

The Dead were pioneers of PA system technology, especially with their epic Wall of Sound. Their system was more conventional by the time I went to see them, but it was still pretty slick. Because they used wireless in-ear monitors and foot switch controls for the vocal mics, there wasn’t any extraneous sound bleeding into the stage mics. The PA broadcast noise-canceling frequencies, the way fancy Bose headphones do. All the way around, the sound at Dead shows was crystal-clear, even in giant echoing stadiums, without extreme loudness. It was a huge disappointment to go hear other bands with lesser systems in the same venues. Like, after seeing the Dead at Giants Stadium a few times, I saw U2 there and it was like having a bucket over my head. Techno-hippies for the win.

You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person

Each new song is built using the same modular components as the other songs of its time and place, the way that all humans share the same genetic toolkit. My sister and I are like two different songs from the same album by the same band. My cousins are like songs on different albums by bands with overlapping members. Here’s a diagram of my entire extended family – parent/child relationships are green and spouse/partner relationships are red.

The ancestry of music is more complicated than the ancestry of humans. A better model for music is the evolution of microbes, with a lot of horizontal gene transfer happening. Biologists use the term “gene cassettes” to describe the semi-self-contained hunks of DNA that bacteria swap back and forth. The analogy to music fans spreading memes by passing tapes around couldn’t be any more perfect.

Some musical relationships do conveniently lend themselves to family tree-like representation. The practice of sampling and quoting existing songs creates a particularly clear and unambiguous set of relationships well-suited to network diagramming. The internet has several handy sample databases, including the Rap Sample FAQ, Whosampled.com and Wikipedia. I’ve been hard at work the past year or so making sample maps visualizing the more interesting chunks of data.

See all of my sample maps here.

Sampling is the easiest set of relationships to diagram, but I could draw similar charts for use of particular scales, chords, rhythmic figures, melodic motifs, rhyme schemes, combinations of instrument sounds, and all the other memetic nuts and bolts of music.

A few really successful memes make up most of the music we hear

Some musical memes are better at getting themselves copied than others, the way genes for color vision or opposable thumbs are good at getting themselves copied. Here in America, the most successful memes include the backbeat, the one-four-five chord progression and the blues scale.

To illustrate just how widespread a musical meme can get, here’s a video called “Four Chords, Thirty-Six Songs.” In the key of C, the four chords are C, G7, Am, F. (Some coarse language towards the end.)

The video barely scratches the surface of all the songs, famous and not, that have used those four chords. So why is this chord progression such a big hit? For one thing, it’s easy to play on piano or guitar or whatever. For another, the four chords sound good in any sequence or combination, spaced out on any harmonic rhythm. They have a wistful yet still uplifting mood that suits a variety of musical statements in a variety of styles.

Computers make recombining and resequencing the memes effortless

Pre-computer, composing and recording a song was a slow and effortful process. You wrote the song out or memorized it. Then you got a band together and they read the song, or you repeated it to them until they memorized it. Then you rehearsed it a bunch, and then recorded it from beginning to end. Sometimes you had to record many takes to get a good one. To get a polished, professional-sounding result generally required expensive gear operated by highly specialized engineers.

You can still operate that way if you want, but computers offer some faster and easier alternatives. I prefer to write by improvising into the sequencer or digital audio editor, picking the best patterns and editing them into shape. The computer gratifyingly collapses improvising, composing and recording into a single act. Making music electronically is like being able to type out any DNA sequence you want and immediately seeing how it will look as an organism. You can skip the tedious embryonic development of notating, rehearsing and memorizing. Technologies like MIDI, sampling and pitch-detection software let you read any existing musical genome and resequence it to your heart’s content.

All this freedom is positively alarming to some of the musicians I know, who view it as evil or immoral in some way. I find that the computer eliminates some of the labor, but doesn’t do the imaginative work for you. The computer makes it effortless to spin out ideas, but you still need to select among them and decide which are the good ones. The creative act itself stays the same as it always has been; there’s just less friction.

Towards a unified theory of musical evolution

A genome is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating the proteins and other structures making up an organism. A group of memes (a memeplex, as Susan Blackmore puts it) is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating performances and recordings. What makes a song likelier to get itself heard, and eventually copied or adapted? Exact copying of previous generations of songs is a bad long-term strategy. Tastes change, like the way the environment changes for organisms. A meme that was successful yesterday may not be successful tomorrow.

Total originality is a bad strategy too. It’s easy to be original, to create a piece of music with no precedent or borrowing from anything existing. Bang randomly on a piano and you’re probably going to play something that’s never been played before. It’s likely that your random banging will mostly be annoying. Chances are, a random DNA sequence won’t make for much of an organism either.

To be liked enough to be copied and imitated, your song will need to be substantially familiar. Forming an emotional connection with the listener requires a lot of shared vocabulary and associations. What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator. Most mutations will make it harder to get copied, but a lucky few improve your chances dramatically.

See a version of this post on Quora.

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.

Ms Heap is accompanying herself with artificial harmonies created by a Digitech Vocalist Workstation. The device reads her pitch in the manner of Auto-tune. She tells it what notes to shift her voice to using the MIDI keyboard. She also uses some digital delay for the echo effect, and towards the end, she samples herself singing the chorus so she can sing the last verse over the playback.

The result is one of the most futuristic sounds I’ve ever heard, and yet it’s also warm and intimate, not icily posthuman like you’d expect from such a high-tech performance. Because the harmony responds on the fly to her singing and keybs playing, she’s free to improvise, phrase and embellish in the moment. Real live choral harmony is cool and everything, but if you want multiple complex parts, you need to write everything out ahead of time, and conduct the singers exactly. It doesn’t leave much room for spontaneity, and spontaneity is key to truth-telling in music. When I say that “fake” technology can result in more real music, this is exactly what I mean. Here’s how Imogen Heap describes the writing of this song in an interview with Electronic Musician:

My favorite computer blew up on me, but I didn’t want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play ten notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It’s quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that’s a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn’t feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I’m not questioning that one at all.

Brian Eno says that for synths to have the soul of traditional instruments, they need to be a little bit unpredictable. All the glossy perfection the computer makes possible can get to be oppressive. You get the best results when you don’t have total control, when there’s room for the happy accident. By confusing the harmony algorithms, you can get unexpected notes that sound way more hip than anything you could have worked out on paper ahead of time. It’s why I’m so addicted to Auto-tune. If you set it right, it reacts in surprising ways, live as it’s happening, opening up new avenues of expression.

Some people think that artificial harmonizers and Auto-tune are dishonest, that they’re cheating, that they’re part of a larger trend towards fakery that’s destroying western civilization as we know it. We have an abiding anxiety about the authenticity of our music. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “authentic” descends from ancient Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal.” This word in turn descends from authentes, “one acting on one’s own authority,” a composite of autos, “self,” and hentes, “doer, being.” The related word “genuine” descends from the Latin genuinus meaning “native, natural,” from the root of gignere, “to beget.” The thinking goes that the word originally referred to paternity.

I think it’s reasonable to be concerned with the parentage of our music, but it’s wrong to be repulsed by the bastardized and the mongrel. All the really exciting music is hybridized. Hip-hop combines the phrasing and improvisation of jazz with European electronic beats. Jazz combines African-American traditions with European harmonies and song structures. Let’s have some mongrel pride! The president of the United States is a self-described mutt. So am I. Purity is lame.

By the way, gorgeously recorded a capellas are irresistable to samplers, so it’s no big surprise that someone would take an interest in using Imogen Heap samples. The best example I could find is Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say.” It won’t change your life or anything, but I give him props for venturing it. I feel less of an urge to sample Imogen Heap and more of an urge to get my hands on a Vocalist Workstation and try out some harmonies of my own.

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.

Here’s how the Funky Drummer loop looks in the Reason loop player and sequencer. The blue thing is the loop player itself, where you can add effects like filter sweeps and pitch shifting. Below, the sequencer shows eight repetitions of the loop, forming an eight-bar phrase, a metaloop.

Here’s the view inside one of the colored boxes in the sequencer, a single iteration of the loop.

Each red brick is a slice, a rhythmic event, a drum or cymbal hit. There are sixteen of them in this loop. Reason follows the dance music convention of thinking of a bar as sixteen sixteenth notes, so it considers the Funky Drummer loop to be one bar long. This convention makes me crazy; I prefer to think of it as two bars of eight eighth notes each. However you want to count it, musicians usually describe this as a sixteenth note feel. Hear the loop:

By removing every other slice of the loop, you change the groove from a sixteenth note feel to a more spacious eighth note feel. The silences have as much presence as the drum hits.

Here’s how the loop sounds in eighth notes.

You don’t need to play the slices of a loop in their original order. Reason lets you play the slices in any order at all. Here’s the Funky Drummer loop completely randomized:

I’m not posting an mp3 of this because it sounds terrible, but sometimes randomizing the slices of a sample can give unexpectedly delightful results. You get especially interesting sounds when you map the MIDI data from one loop to the audio from a different one. You can also try new combinations by playing the slices from a keyboard or other MIDI controller. The slices automatically map to the chromatic scale, so slice one is the lowest C on the keyboard, slice two is C sharp, slice three is D and so on.

The loop player gets even more interesting when you supply it with a melodic phrase. By playing pieces of the melody in different orders and shifting the individual notes up and down, you can effortlessly create new melodies from any existing sample. The combinatorial possibilities are dizzying.

I see a strong analogy between shuffling the pieces of a sample to create new music and shuffling DNA letters to create new organisms. In biological evolution, all new organisms come about by the semi-accidental reshuffling of existing organisms’ genomes. So, for instance, mutations can happen when a sequence of DNA gets repeated accidentally during copying:

I believe that new music comes about this way too. Before software like Reason and Recycle, the reshuffling of musical memes happened exclusively in musicians’ minds, or later on paper. The software extends the power of our recombinational imaginations to recorded music, not just imaginary music. Powerful stuff!

Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding a lot like Jerry Garcia. 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 like the music.

Jerry was a groove player

The biggest lesson Jerry taught me was to play at slow to medium tempos, using beats you can dance to. He did his best work over relaxed one-chord or two-chord Afrocentric grooves with a free jazz flavor. He played okay country and white R&B, and I guess he very infrequently rocked. But mostly he was devoted to trance-like grooves.

I went to see the Dead several times in high school, and a few increasingly depressing times my freshman year of college. Jerry was completely phoning it in at that point, and the rest of the guys were uneven at best. And yet, those shows were still pretty magical experiences. There was a lot of audience participation, group singing and dancing and clapping. I’m a nerdy white guy, and I spend a lot of time alone or with strangers. I don’t do a lot of group singing and dancing and clapping. Those activities are an essential social vitamin, and I feel the absence of them in my life now. Dead shows could be messy and lame, but they were a reliable source of  tribal-feeling ecstatic experience. The Dead frequently compared their following to a religious cult. If church was more like a Dead show, I’d probably go.

The best thing the band did during the years I went to see them was to close their shows with “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly. The song is a modal I7-IV groove over a distinctive beat: clap, clap, clap, clap clap; clap, clap, clap, clap clap. It’s an Afro-Cuban pattern called son clave — rock musicians know it as the Bo Diddley beat. Jerry loved the Bo Diddley beat and used it in song after song. Over the course of “Not Fade Away,” the Dead taught the entire crowd to clap son clave. During the very extended tag out, while singing “Love is real, and not fade away” over and over, the band would pull the volume back quieter and quieter until all you could hear was the crowd’s clapping and singing. Then they’d simply wave goodnight and walk offstage as the crowd continued. I remember one show at Giants Stadium in high school, the crowd kept the chant going all the way down the ramps and across the parking lot. Powerful!

The Dead weren’t a good band, but they were a great one

The Dead didn’t try very hard to be liked. They could never be bothered to sing in key. They wrote convoluted arrangements and didn’t rehearse them, so they routinely trainwrecked. The music was ad-hoc and messily indifferent a lot of the time. Some of the lyrics are pretty, but a lot of them are empty stoner poetry.

And yet. For brief intervals during their long and checkered career, the Dead could be the greatest band in the world. At their best, they were daringly inventive, and they performed some dazzling feats of group improvisation. Their frequent risk-taking necessarily involved a lot of failure, but also made possible big musical successes. The band’s musical successes were widely scattered, but they played for so many years that they managed to rack up quite a bit of inspired playing.

The Dead as viral marketing pioneers

The good news for the fans is that searching for the magic moments is extremely easy. Just about every public note that Jerry Garcia ever played is meticulously archived and available. The professionally-mastered high points can be downloaded commercially, and the band lets the fans give the rest away free.

From the beginning, the Dead had a famously relaxed attitude toward concert taping. At shows there was a special seating area reserved for tapers, who were invited to plug directly into the soundboard for maximum recording quality. Jerry was inspired by a similar custom at the bluegrass festivals he attended as a young guy. This practice of encouraging people to tape Dead shows started out as a bit of hippie idealism, but turned out to be a brilliant viral marketing strategy.

In high school one of my most treasured possessions was my cassette copy of 5/8/77 set II with its labels in my friend Ellie’s handwriting. The encore cut off halfway through. A lot of tapes like this circulated through the hands of a lot of obsessive fans like me, spreading the band’s music through word of mouth, until in the 1980s the Dead suddenly emerged one of the biggest moneymakers in the live music industry.

The Dead concert tape trading network got a lot more efficient once it got a hold of the internet, but even before the web it was surprisingly robust. Using snail mail and word of mouth, it was possible to get your hands on pretty much any of the most widely-traded shows. You mailed cassettes off in padded mailers with return postage, and a few weeks later, there would be your fresh tapes. It was like a very slowly-paced mp3 blog. The Dead’s fan base was never that big compared to that of the Stones or the Beatles, but it was deep, and obsessively devoted. By insisting on giving away so much of his recorded music for free, Jerry died much wealthier than he was born.

The image of no image

The Dead’s popularity peaked at a time when they were the least telegenic bunch of rock musicians imaginable. They were middle-aged, homely and flamboyantly uncharismatic. Onstage, Bob Weir made an effort to look alive, move around, and engage the crowd a little, but the rest of the band just looked at the floor, Jerry especially. The Dead’s pointed indifference to their look was a big part of what drew me into listening to them in the first place. I figured that they must have been seriously badass to have so much celebrity with so little image. I didn’t yet understand that lack of image is itself an extremely compelling image.

Here’s how I remember Jerry looking those years I was going to shows.

Jerry had a cult leader quality that he tried to discourage, without success. Americans are suckers for a messianistic beard. The New Yorker once aptly described Jerry’s look as “an unmade bed.” Other likenesses: Santa, Gandalf, Jesus, a grandpa, a caveman, a guru, a homeless person, a hermit. The main thing he looked was: old. Jerry was only fifty-three when he died, but due to his hard living he looked more like eighty-three. He may not have been the first geriatric rock star, but he most looked the part. He’s the only major rock star I can think of who became more popular and influential as his hair got whiter.

Jerry’s wardrobe was mostly limited to black t-shirts, with black sweats or black jeans. The rest of the band were similarly not fashion-conscious. Phil Lesh performed in red-white-and-blue wristbands, a tie-dyed t-shirt tucked into khaki slacks, and running shoes. Taken together, the late-period Dead looked like my parents’ friends, or the English department at a small liberal arts college.

This photo comes from the liner notes to In The Dark, which contains the Dead’s one and only top ten hit song, “Touch Of Grey.” The phrase perfectly describes both the band and their core fan base.

Iconography

As people, the Dead may not have been very image-conscious, but they had exquisitely good taste in graphic designers. They had a killer logo, the Stealie, so named because it appeared on the cover of the Steal Your Face album. It’s a dreadful album, possibly the band’s worst, but what a cover.

The logo was designed by the Dead’s sound engineer and in-house LSD provider, Owsley “Bear” Stanley. He devised it for stickers that he put on the band’s equipment, making it easier to tell it from the other bands’ gear in dark backstage areas.

Why did I draw Stealies on my notebooks in high school about forty thousand times? For one thing, it’s fun to draw. It’s an easy little visual algorithm to memorize, but you have to really pay attention to get the execution right. It looks dangerous and occult, ancient yet modern, funny yet sinister, symmetrical yet asymmetrical. It’s a play on the American flag, the bones of the head, the lightning strike of inspiration. Its meaning is, as my shrink would say, multiply-determined.

The Stealie is a stupendously successful meme. You can put anything in it in place of the lightning bolt: a dancing bear, a turtle, Jerry’s face, the name of your frat. Some clever person did a t-shirt that had an infinitely recursive series of smaller skulls-within-skulls. The skull can anchor all kinds of cool new designs and adventurous typography, like on this t-shirt I wore on a weekly basis through high school and into college.

I was exposed to the Dead’s iconography long before I heard any of the music. My stepbrother stored a bunch of his records in our apartment’s closet when I was growing up, and eventually I got curious and started poking around them. Along with the Allman Brothers and Steely Dan, there were a couple of Dead albums whose covers practically radiated menace.

When I finally worked up the nerve to listen to one of them, I was surprised to hear not the death metal I was expecting, but instead, agreeable spacy jazzy-country-rock. Here’s a much less frightening album cover from Europe ’72, a Stanley Mouse painting nicknamed Ice Cream Boy:

I get a MAD Magazine vibe from this image, like Don Martin meets R Crumb. Jerry was an avid MAD reader as a kid, as was I.

Along with eye-catching album covers and t-shirts, the Dead also put out some gorgeous books. A standout: this book of hand-lettered transcriptions of every tune on American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead:

The Dead’s music

What sets jam bands apart from the rock mainstream isn’t so much the jamming — every flavor of halfway decent American music has improvisation. The Dead are distinctive because of their loose, laid-back, non-urgent feel, a vibe that has more in common with jazz or country than rock.

The Dead didn’t kick much ass, but there are things a band can do other than kick ass. For such a big lumbering animal, the band could play remarkably quietly. On the Jerry’s ballads like “He’s Gone” or “High Time” they could bring two electric guitars, a six-string bass, one or two keyboards and one or two full drum kits down to total silence at the end of each measure, in a stadium packed with people. This is no small accomplishment. Playing loud and hectic is easy; playing restrained and quiet is hard. The Dead could play slower and quieter than any other rock band I can think of. Ask any musician how tough it is to play slow tempos without losing energy. The ambling pace of tunes like “Sugaree,” “He’s Gone” and “High Time” annoyed me as a teenager, but the older I get, the more sense the unhurried, conversational tone makes.

Jerry’s guitar style

The musical story of the Grateful Dead is a series of snapshots of Jerry’s psyche, variously bouyed and hindered by his bandmates, variously bouyed and hindered by himself. The mid-seventies were a crisis point for the band, the closest they came to breaking up, and the consensus is that they never recovered. But I have a particular fondness for the Dead’s music of this period. The bloom was off the rose by that point, as the band slid from hallucinogens into cocaine, heroin and alcohol, but they still had the essential sound together. The tempos were nice and rubbery, the emphasis was on groove and polyrhythm, and when Jerry was paying attention, he did some of his best playing during the long, languid jams and grooves.

Jerry’s greatness as a guitarist isn’t so much a matter of technical skill. He had good chops by rock standards, but he was no virtuoso. What he had going for him was touch and phrasing. He massaged and squeezed individual notes into curvy shapes, in a style informed by his pedal steel playing. Jerry’s most-heard recording is probably his pedal steel part on “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Rockers tend to lean ahead of the beat, but Jerry played behind the beat, sometimes way behind. Again, this was due to his close study of jazz and country. His tone was mostly clean and nondemonstrative, sometimes even hesitant. Guitar heros playing to packed stadiums usually aren’t so quietly unobtrusive.

Jerry’s improvising was harmonically adventurous, spiced with ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, microtones and intentional “wrong” notes like the natural seventh against dominant seventh chords. He favored a spicy diminished scale lick that he learned straight from Coltrane. Jerry was a tremendous music dork with keen insight into his own approach; see, for instance, this terrific interview in Guitar Player.

Maybe even more valuable than his original work was Jerry’s ability to synthesize seemingly disparate sources into idiosyncratic new ideas. He drew inspiration not just from rock, but from R&B, blues, swing, bebop, free jazz, bluegrass, assorted world musics, ragtime and electronica (Jerry loved controlling synths with a MIDI guitar.) He would have been an incredible music blogger or DJ. His interviews were an excellent guide into the more obscure corners of American music. For instance, Jerry loved Elizabeth Cotten and covered several of her tunes, both with and without the Dead. Do yourself a favor and check her out, she’s one of my favorite guitarists ever.

Jerry’s recommendations also led me to Howlin’ Wolf, Peter Tosh, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Robbie Robertson, Bill Monroe and Carlos Santana.

Jerry and depression

The Dead derived a lot of their power from their surprising nihilism. Jerry mentioned at one point that the name Grateful Dead was specifically chosen to “repel curious onlookers.” Forget the dancing teddy bears; think of the skulls, and the fact that Jerry wore all black all the time.

Much as I love Jerry, I haven’t been able to get interested in many of the jam bands he inspired. The jammers have Jerry’s amiable eclecticism, but they lack his sinister edge. Taking the darkness out of the sixties misses the point of that troubled and turbulent period of our nation’s history. Bands like Phish prefer to evade the despair at the core of hippiedom.

I was saddened but not surprised to learn that Jerry had a troubled inner life. He was five when his father drowned, and he had a difficult relationship with his mother and stepfather. He was married many times, never happily, and he was visibly indifferent to his own health and well-being. He self-medicated his depression with a variety of increasingly ineffective hard drugs. Maybe Jerry thought he was using heroin and cocaine for pleasure, but it looks more to me like a gradual suicide.

The band suffered many casualties besides Jerry. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the Dead’s original frontman, drank himself to death at age twenty-seven. Keyboardist Keith Godchaux died in a motorcycle accident after quitting the band. His replacement, Brent Mydland, capped off a longstanding cocaine addiction with a fatal overdose. His replacement, Vince Welnick, committed suicide a few years after being edged out of the reconstituted post-Jerry band.

In interviews, some of the band members (Bob Weir and Phil Lesh particularly) come across as spectacularly misanthropic. At no point did the Dead ever convey themselves as a bunch of people you’d want to hang out with. They made a good-faith effort to help the paying customers have a good time, but their music was frequently impersonal, emotionally closed-off and inaccessible.

But Jerry’s playing had a way of transcending his environment. The best musicians take tragedy and transform it into pleasure. Jerry matters to me because he was an extremely unhappy person who nonetheless created some music that could make you happier. Really, what greater contribution to humanity could you ask for?

Recommended listening

All of the shows by the Dead and Jerry’s various side projects are archived here. Some high points:

2/28/69 Fillmore West

2/13-14/70 Fillmore East

5/2/70 Harpur College

12/31/71 Winterland Arena – check out “Space” -> “Other One”

4/8/72 London, England – check out “Dark Star” -> “Caution.”

8/24/72 Berkeley, CA

9/27/72 Stanley Theater — “Dark Star” segues smoothly and spontaneously into “Cumberland Blues,” an amazing display of group cohesion.

12/19/73 Tampa, FL — dig “Playing In The Band.”

2/23/74 and 2/24/74 Winterland Arena — The first one is slow to get going, but once they’ve warmed up, wow. The second one pretty much kills all the way through.

5/8/77 Cornell U — a Deadhead cliche for good reason, it’s the bomb. The previous and following nights were good too.

9/3/77 Englishtown, NJ

12/29/77 Winterland

12/26/79 Oakland Auditorium

Any version of “Dark Star,” “Morning Dew” or “The Other One” is going to be worth a spin.

The best albums by far are Live/Dead, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead.

Blues For Allah is good too, if you like the weirder, more spaced-out stuff. One From The Vault is Blues For Allah performed in front of an audience, mixed in with some Dead classics played as well as they ever got played.

Reckoning is basically the Grateful Dead Unplugged. There’s a nice version of “Bird Song,” a tribute to Janis Joplin, who the band was friendly with. One of the saddest moments in the documentary Festival Express is a shot of Jerry and Janis, both so drunk they can barely speak, and Jerry is telling Janis how beautiful she is, and you know how soon after that she’ll be dead.

Jerry Garcia Band is a double live album from 1990. Nice choice of material, ranging from the Band to the Beatles to Peter Tosh to Hoagy Carmichael.

Europe ’72 has a few choice cuts: “Cumberland Blues,” “He’s Gone,” “Tennessee Jed” which has some of Jerry’s funkiest playing, “Ramble On Rose,” “Jack Straw.”

Terrapin Station is way uneven, but it has a few tracks worth checking out. “Estimated Prophet” is reggae in seven-four time, with many abrupt key changes. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and yet it’s easily the best Dead song written post-1975. Bobby gives the lead vocal of his career, Jerry discovers envelope filter, the whole thing hangs right together. The other standout cut is “Samson And Delilah.”

In The Dark is interesting for including “Touch Of Grey,” the band’s only top ten hit. The high point is “West LA Fadeaway” which is within shouting distance of funky.

Update: check out this artwork made of cassette tape made by iri5. Nice pairing of subject and medium, don’t you think?

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.

Hear the game controller in action on the synth in this track:

Take The 2-3 Train by ethanhein

The software maps the buttons and knobs on the controller to different MIDI values. I can play one octave of each of a few different scales (blues, major, harmonic and melodic minor, diminished) in all twelve keys. I can scroll through the circle of fifths with the controller’s D-pad. It’s set so that my left index and middle fingers control the root and third of the scale, my right index and middle control the fourth and fifth, and my right thumb reaches the rest of the scale tones. With the thumb sticks I can control pitch bend, modulation and other parameters, depending on which software instrument is dialed up.

The controller plays anything that any other MIDI instrument can play, not just synthesizers. I can map any batch of recorded sounds to the buttons. It’s fun loading bells or speech samples or bird calls onto it and playing them through heavy delay over a beat.

The controller interface software was written by Ben Lacker in Max/MSP. It works with any USB video game controller, but it was specifically designed for the one in the screenshot, a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.

I mostly played guitar in my bands through my twenties, using lots of digital delay and other high-tech effects. As my sound got more electronic I started using a keyboard hooked up to my laptop. For a while I was carrying around a Korg 49, which has a bunch of cool drum pads and control knobs in addition to a half-piano’s worth of keybs. It was way more controller than I needed. I felt kind of like a chump carrying such a big instrument around just to play one note while twiddling a knob for the entire song. Part of the motivation to set up the game controller was to be able to have the same control scheme on a device I could more easily carry around on the subway.

The Korg 49′s keys and drum pads are pressure-sensitive. The game controller isn’t. Its buttons have only has two settings, on and off. It offers no control of dynamics at all. This limitation has turned out to be mostly a good thing for live situations, and even for home sequencing. For samples especially, it sounds better to mix everything to a nice balance and then be forced to keep it that way. It moves my complete focus to rhythm. I can pitch bend or filter with the thumbsticks for expressiveness when I need it.

I’ve tried a few other game controllers with the MIDI interface program. Some of them show potential. The most intriguing one is the Dance Dance Revolution pad. It would be perfect if it didn’t map itself to strange MIDI parameters by default. Out of the box, half the buttons don’t do anything useful, and I don’t have the programming mojo to fix it. Maybe in the future I’ll get it ironed out. It could be like a customizable, more ergonomic version of the giant ground piano in Big, as seen in this extremely bootleg Youtube video.

The Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers have potential too, but they don’t have as many buttons or parameters as the Logitech pad. Same with the Taiko Drum Master controller. This is nothing against any of these controllers in their original contexts, where they work great. I haven’t gotten to try DJ Hero but I expect it’ll be a similar deal. The Nintendo Wii controller is becoming the game controller of choice for futuristic computer musicians. I haven’t used one for anything except games yet, but there are some cool-looking things on my list. Specifically, I’m looking forward to experimenting with Wii Loop Machine and Wii Drum High. There are also some groovy-looking things for the Game Boy DS, like Korg DS-10 and Nitrotracker. For all of the above plus iPhone there’s a thing called Osculator that looks fun.

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.

We think of sampling as this high-tech modern practice, but analog sampling keyboards go back to the early fifties. The first one was the Chamberlin. It played short tape recordings of a few different instruments when you pressed the keys. The Chamberlin has a much more famous descendant (some might say ripoff), the Mellotron. Here’s a little branding 101: don’t name your invention after yourself, unless you have a cool name like Robert Moog. Pick something retrofuture and groovy. The Mellotron sounds like something from Sleeper that you use between the Orb and the Orgasmatron. The intro of the Beatles’  “Strawberry Fields Forever” is Paul McCartney playing sampled flutes on a Mellotron.

Analog tape isn’t a great sample medium. The mechanisms are delicate and bulky. The tape decays over time. The little motors have to be running at exactly the right speed for the notes to play back in tune. Sampling keyboards didn’t really take off until the invention of inexpensive digital audio. Now that computers can play back audio recordings and perform all kinds of strange mathematical operations on them in real time, anything with a processor and a sound card can act as a sampler. Even high-end cell phones can perform the same functions as Ferris Bueller’s E-mu.

Some sampled instruments work better than others. A MIDI interface can only capture certain aspects of your performance: which note you played, how loud you played it, how long you held it. You can add some other performance data with the sustain pedal, with the pitch or mod wheels, and maybe with a few other parameters. That’s not nearly enough data dimensionality to convey all the infinitesimal nuances of the way a violin bow or guitar pick grips and releases a string. Stringed instruments sound extremely fake when played on a sampling keyboard. The fakeness has its own charms, but that’s a whole different instrument unto itself. Piano works well as a MIDI instrument since it practically was one to begin with. Any keyboard instrument translates well to MIDI. Massed orchestral instruments work better than solo ones. Horn samples can work okay if you don’t mind monotonous phrasing. Again, sometimes the robotic sound has its own quality. I mostly prefer more purely electronic sounds like abstract synths and samples of other songs.

One of my most entertaining experiments with sampling was called the Sikoratron. It’s a Reason patch I made using samples of Catherine Sikora, who I played with in a jazz group. To build my sample library, I recorded every member of the horn section doing solo improvisations. Catherine recorded these long, angular Coltrane-esque sax lines. By mapping different phrases to different regions of the keyboard, I could play my own far-out Catherine solos. The results were unpredictable, since the tonality of the phrases didn’t necessarily match the key that triggered them. The Sikoratron gave the best results when my non-keyboard playing friends explored it intuitively with their index fingers.

The full surrealism of MIDI is only just revealing itself. You can map sampled sounds to just about any physical action. Jerry Garcia used a MIDI guitar to play synthesized flute and such with the Grateful Dead. MIDI guitar such a cool idea in theory, since the guitar is already an amazing analog synth controller. Unfortunately, you can’t just slap a MIDI pickup unto an electric guitar, because it won’t track as accurately as you would want. You need to get an expensive special guitar made of a futuristic carbon composite. Fine if you’re Jerry Garcia, lame if you’re a normal person.

When I play electronic music live, I do my sample triggering with a video game controller. It’s more limited than a full MIDI keyboard, but for my stuff that’s a virtue. I see the future of MIDI belonging to game controllers. Check out this Synthtopia post on the world’s strangest MIDI controllers. Behold the Drumpants:

Other videos show people controlling synths and samples using pennies, a laser, a robotic exoskeleton, a sheet of paper, a driver’s license, hamsters and other odd things. Music looks like it’s going to continue to be fun in the future.