Saturday, February 12, 2011
I’ve read that Quincy Jones carries around copies of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue in his briefcase, and that he hands them out to kids whenever he meets them. Q-Tip compares Kind Of Blue to the Bible — you’re just expected to have a copy around the house. If you’ve never heard jazz before, Kind [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Theory, Sampling
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Also tagged ahmad jamal, classical, debussy, erykah badu, gil evans, james brown, jazz, john coltrane, mashups, mccoy tyner, memes, morton gould, Music Theory, public enemy, Sampling, the heavy
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My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop and so on: natural minor, harmonic minor and dorian. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. It’s called the melodic [...]
Saturday, January 22, 2011
When you first set out to learn your scales, it can be discouraging. There are so many of them, and their names are so bewildering. The good news is that when you learn one scale, you get a bunch of other scales that you get “for free.” This is because many scales share the same [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged beatles, benny golson, bjork, blues, classical, dizzy gillespie, jazz, lynyrd skynyrd, modes, Music Theory, rock, samuel barber, scales
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Expanding on a post about blues basics. When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, charles mingus, chords, dave brubeck, guitar, harmony, henry mancini, jazz, Music Theory
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Wednesday, November 10, 2010
I’ve picked up some new guitar students lately, so I’m once again doing a lot of explaining what a tritone is and why people should care. Whenever I find myself explaining something a lot, I like to encapsulate it as a blog post. So here we go. A tritone is the interval between the notes [...]
Filed in Emotion, Math, Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, busta rhymes, chords, irrational numbers, Math, melodic minor, michael jackson, Music Theory, psychology, scales, simpsons, sonny rollins, stevie wonder, thelonious monk, tritones
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Thursday, October 14, 2010
Mad Men’s obsessive devotion to period accuracy has one conspicuous exception: its hip-hop theme song by RJD2. The track plays under one of television’s all-time great opening title sequences, which I can’t embed because AMC doesn’t understand how internet marketing works. Click this collage I made to watch on YouTube. The theme song is an [...]
Filed in Music, Sampling
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Also tagged aceyalone, cannonball adderley, digging the crates, enoch light, hip-hop, jazz, mad men, rjd2, Sampling, theme songs
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Saturday, October 9, 2010
The internet is home to a lot of questionably legal breakbeat collections like Drumaddikt and Cyberworm’s Sample Blog. “Cold Sweat” by James Brown is always included in these collections. It’s beloved equally by hip-hop and drum n bass producers. The break is at 4:30. There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and [...]
This weekend my electronica band Revival Revival is doing some shows for the first time in many months. We’ll be doing a lot of what my non-electronic-musician friends consider to be cheating. The lead vocals and guitar will be live, as will some of the synths. Everything else will be canned, recordings played back from [...]
Filed in Autobio, Hardware, Improvisation, Music, Recording, Software
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Also tagged authenticity, electronica, guitar, Improvisation, lionel richie, michael jackson, midi, pop, pro tools, reason, remixes, revival revival, songwriting
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Saturday, November 28, 2009
If you’re in a band, chances are you feel like you’re supposed to be writing your own material. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales (should you, improbably, be selling albums.) Writing your own stuff isn’t just a financial consideration. The [...]
Filed in Autobio, Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged arrangement, big band, chet baker, copyright, count basie, duke ellington, frank sinatra, harmony, Improvisation, jay-z, jazz, john coltrane, lego, looping, memes, modules, Music, Music Theory, my favorite things, originality, reharmonization, remixes, Sampling, swing, symmetry, the sound of music
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For a long time, “Human Nature” was not my favorite song on Thriller. It took me many years to wise up to how awesome it is. Maybe it’s a gender thing. I played it for Anna last night and she swooned instantly over the delivery, arrangement, melody, the whole thing worked for her. I’m slowly [...]
Filed in Composition, Emotion, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged jazz, michael jackson, nas, pop, quincy jones, remixes, rnb, Sampling, swv, thriller, toto, tupac
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