Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.

I’ve played around with a few web-based music apps, and this is by far my favorite. It’s a software version of the Tenori-On that boils the drum machine and sequencer interface down to their barest essentials. If you’ve never made electronic music before, the iNudge would be a great introduction. The software that I use for my tracks is more complex, but the core functionality is the same.

The iNudge was made by Hobnox, makers of Audiotool, a much bigger and more complex web-based music program. I find the Audiotool to be interesting and graphically attractive, but too complicated and not discoverable enough. Part of the problem is that the Audiotool emulates electronic music production hardware. That’s fine if you’re familiar with the gear it’s emulating, but it’s a mystifying bunch of knobs otherwise. Propellerheads’ Reason suffers from the same problem. It does a great job of emulating a variety of hardware devices, but as a visual metaphor for a computer program, it’s annoyingly counterfunctional. The “hardware” turns into a bunch of decorative elements that take up valuable screen real estate and attentional resources from the screen regions that actually do stuff.

The Tenori-On is a terrific visual metaphor and it translates well to the computer screen. If you’ve mastered the mouse or touchscreen, you know all you need to know. Audio software is most discoverable when it abstracts away from hardware and represents its different modules as simple boxes connected by arrows, like Max/MSP. The ideal interface for the signal chain would be a flexible network visualization tool like Omnigraffle.

Another nice feature of iNudge is the way it presents pitches to you. The adjacent rows on the grid aren’t mapped to the piano keys. They’re mapped to the D major/B minor pentatonic scale. You’re limited exclusively to that scale. You lose access to many notes, but you also can’t do anything that sounds bad. Vertically the grid limits you to straight eighth notes. As with the harmony, it restricts your choices but also prevents you from doing anything unmusical. If I were to extend the program one step more complicated, I might include a palette or pull-down menu with different rhythmic grids and scales.

Some other noteworthy music-making tools on the web:

The Daft Punk console let you remix “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger.”

JS-909 is a drum machine in the browser.

Indaba is full-blown audio recording, mixing and editing in the browser with a social media component. I haven’t explored it too thoroughly yet, but I’m impressed by its ambition and scope.

Another in-browser audio recorder and editor I haven’t tried yet is Myna.

Ways to embed mp3s and playlists in the browser:

Facebook – when you post the URL of an mp3 file, FB automatically posts it in a neat little player.

Tumblr – same as Facebook.

Soundcloud – The best band-centric mp3 hosting and sharing service I’ve come across. Nice interface, including the option to comment on specific regions of songs.

The groovy WordPress mp3 plugin that I use throughout this blog.

Twitter with its associated third-party music add-ons like Blip.fm.

I think the merging of music-making and social media is an exciting development. Anything to bring more audience participation to the game is a good idea. If you guys can point me at some more fun tools and toys, hit the comments.

Let’s say you’d never heard of the Beatles, and I played you “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” “Within You Without You,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” You wouldn’t have any reason to think they were written and recorded by the same people. They weren’t. The three songs are effectively solo John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney tunes, respectively. It’s wonderful to imagine that a single group of humans working together could have produced such wildly disparate sounds, and it was a royal bummer for me to find out that during long stretches of the Sgt Pepper’s sessions, the Beatles weren’t even talking to each other.

I think the late Beatles are still so relevant because they remind people my age and younger of our divorced parents. Their albums are extremely well-made art produced by a group of people in a failed and dysfunctional relationship. Yet the product bears a collective name, creating the illusion of a unified creative team. For legal reasons, the songwriting credits are mostly Lennon/McCartney, even after the two stopped writing and recording in the same room. It’s like how my mom retains my dad’s last name decades after their divorce and remarriage to other people. The mental process of trying to resolve the jagged stylistic contradictions in Sgt Pepper is familiar to me, it’s like squaring the conflicting values and loyalties of my parents and stepparents. Late Beatles albums are more like mixtapes than albums by a band.

I was always was more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy. Like me, the Beatles didn’t remotely hate their parents. Not the way rock stars usually do; not the way the Stones did. The Beatles revered their parents. They wrote songs for and about them. It’s mostly McCartney doing these songs, but my favorite John Lennon song ever is about his mother Julia. The Beatles were kid-friendly, too. Could you imagine the Stones writing “Yellow Submarine” or “Octopus’ Garden”?

Most rock musicians turn their angst into hedonistic defiance or anger. The Beatles turned most of their angst into wistfulness. Even when their music pushed boundaries, it mostly did so in a relatively polite, restrained way. Maybe the band kept so much composure in their later years because instead of playing in rowdy bars, they were performing for George Martin and the BBC engineers in their coats and ties. These straightlaced British civil servants were the only listeners present for most of the band’s live music-making after 1965, along with Yoko Ono. The Beatles’ poker face is uptight by rock standards, but it makes perfect sense for professionals in a high-tech work setting.

The advances in recording technology that gave the late Beatles albums so much of their imaginative sweep also contributed to their feeling of alienation. In the early years, the band recorded by getting together in a room and playing live to single-track tape. By the end, Paul McCartney could use multitracking to play every instrument on “Back In The USSR” and “Birthday”, as if he was Prince recording “When Doves Cry.” The tape collage stuff like “Revolution 9″ and the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever” is more like Aphex Twin than Chuck Berry. And the instrumentation moved steadily into synth and sampler territory. The flutes at the beginning of “Strawberry Fields” aren’t real, they’re tape samples in a Mellotron. Here’s a video about this early sampling keyboard – thanks, Nick Seaver.

The famous medley that ends Abbey Road is a sixteen-minute DJ mix of leftovers from the White Album and Let It Be. It was carefully edited into a seamless suite by McCartney and George Martin. The medley can’t exist outside of the recording medium. The Beatles never played it live, and to my knowledge no one else has either. How would you even approach it? I learned the first chunk on the guitar and it was a whole music education unto itself, but my rendition is not going to make you forget the original.

Given how electronic their sound was, it’s a shame that the Beatles have never allowed anyone to sample them. If they had been born twenty years later, they might well have tried their hand at loops and breakbeats. Their early songs are collages of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins and Buddy Holly. The later, more ambitious songs feel more “original” only because the source material for the collaged is more diverse. Wikipedia says:

According to Lennon, “Because” was inspired by Ludwig van Beethoven‘s “Moonlight Sonata“. “Yoko was playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano … I said, ‘Can you play those chords backwards?’, and wrote ‘Because’ around them.

Another Beatles classical remix is “Blackbird.” It includes a fragment of Bach‘s Bourrée in E minor. It’s the ascending G major part, a loop that runs through the song. These guys are a narural fit for sample culture.

Not like people are waiting for permission to sample the Beatles. The white half of Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse, made his first big splash by combining Jay-Z‘s Black Album with the White Album into his breathtakingly copyright-infringing Grey Album. While no one is officially allowed to sample the Fab Four, some people have been allowed to use pieces of cover versions.

Common’s song “Forever Begins”, produced by Kanye West, samples a cover of “She’s Leaving Home” by Syreeta. The line “Father snores as his wife gets into…” loops under the verses. The sample cuts off “her dressing gown.” It’s a strange thing to rap over, but it works. (The track also uses another perfect sample, Steve Gadd’s snare drum intro to “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon.)

Here’s a screen shot of Beatles Rock Band – click through to see the fascinating vocal notation more clearly. It’s a combination of MIDI and standard music notation.

So what do you say, Beatles copyright holders? How about loosening up the restrictions a little? People are remixing the tunes anyway. Why not get in front of the situation and put the stems on iTunes or Amazon? Nothing can ever replace those albums, but why should the story end there? “Forever Begins” doesn’t take anything away from “She’s Leaving Home” any more than “Because” takes away from the Moonlight Sonata. We the fans have been remixing the songs in our heads for years anyway. Why not let us do it with computers too?

Here’s a remix/cover/mashup of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” combined with “Galang” by M.I.A. and “Slide” by Missy Elliot. Vocals by Babsy Singer, production and game controller synth by me.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

If you haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Who is an extremely long-running, low-budget British science fiction show about a time-traveling alien being who looks like a flamboyant Oxford don. Or actually a series of flamboyant Oxford dons. The original actor playing Doctor Who was elderly and became ill while the show was just getting to be popular. When he couldn’t continue, the BBC ingeniously decided to have the Doctor’s species periodically reincarnate as a routine part of their life cycle. They were thus able to keep the show going through many changes of lead actor. Doctor Who has been on the air for most of the past forty-five years with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Here’s the original 1963 title sequence, with music composed by Ron Grainer and arranged, produced and recorded by Delia Derbyshire:

Let’s talk for a second about Delia Derbyshire.

She produced the Doctor Who theme music using analog oscillators and tape loops, laboriously, over a period of many weeks. Here she talks about her process.

Her name suggests that she might have been a professor at Hogwarts, but Delia Derbyshire was a genuine hipster ambient techno producer, decades before such a thing existed. She was buddies with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Brian Jones and the guys in Pink Floyd. In addition to the Doctor Who theme, she produced a bunch of other tripped-out electronica. Hear a sample:

Delia Derbyshire – “Planetarium”

The Doctor Who theme I was hearing in the eighties as a third grader was a newer arrangement by Peter Howell:

The Delia Derbyshire version broke a lot of new ground, but the eighties version is the one that really works for me musically. The groove is tighter because the bass was recorded to a click track. The main melody is played on an Arp Odyssey, a more sophisticated version of the synth they used for R2D2′s voice. Peter Howell sings the B section melody wordlessly through a vocoder. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video if you want to really geek all the way out. Dude isn’t the world’s most dynamic camera presence, but he demonstrates all the different retrofuture gear one piece at a time.

In 1988, The KLF had a number one pop hit in the UK with “Doctorin’ The Tardis” which includes a sample of the Peter Howell theme.

What I like about electronic music is how it makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. The best science fiction does that too. Nothing could have sounded more futuristic or otherworldly to me as a kid than those synths and that vocoder. Now they’re museum pieces.

Auto-tune entered my musical life mainly from my work with Barbara Singer, who I met in 2003. She posted in the Craigslist Musicians section about this gig she had at the now-defunct Korova Milk Bar in the East Village, and how she was looking for a guitarist or some other instrumentalist. The idea was this: she would mix beats on a Roland MC-909 groovebox and sing, and I would improvise textural guitar sounds on top. Her repertoire was a set of pop songs in a variety of genres, sung in a flat, affectless voice thickly coated in digital abstraction: delay, harmonizer, distortion, peculiar reverbs.

We tried several different iterations of the band over the next few years, playing and recording, experimenting in open-ended ways. Then a few things happened in my musical life. Guitar gigs dried up. Laptop DJ gigs appeared slowly in their place. I got deeply into Reason, then Recycle, and the production possibilities of Pro Tools. I wrote and recorded a lot of spacy R&B with Nicole Bishop that got increasingly posthuman and electronic as we went along. Nicole is a legit singer with good chops, but we still did some pitch correction on her using Melodyne, for instance to organize her melismas into definite melodies. Melodyne is designed to make the singer still sound human at the end, and it doesn’t do that perfectly quantized, hard right angled robot sound we were hearing on the radio. So I shelled out for Auto-tune. I tried it on Nicole and it was rad. Then I tried it on Barbara and it was even more rad. Filtered through Auto-tune, her voice took on a keyboard-like quality that we realized was the missing ingredient in the sound we’d been after for five years. We’ve used it on everything we’ve recorded since.

To give you an idea how Auto-tune works, check out this image from wikipedia. It illustrates a different digital audio concept, but it’s a useful visualization of Auto-tune as well.

Imagine that the red line shows a singer’s actual pitch, swooping up, then down, then back up. The horizontal grey lines are different piano-keyboard pitches. Auto-tune snaps the red line to the closest grey line to produce the stairstepped black line,  the robo-vocal sound on so many recent hip-hop songs.

A lot of singers I know don’t like Auto-tune. They grumble that they shouldn’t have bothered to do all that practicing and studying. Auto-tune makes things easier in the studio, and increasingly on stage, no doubt about it. This bothers people who care about how difficult music is to make. Auto-tune threatens some of the myths we have about musicality: that it’s a special talent possessed only by an exceptional few, and that there’s something noble and admirable in the lifetime of discipline it requires. When Lil Wayne goes into a recording studio, smokes a blunt or three and freestyles an Auto-tuned melody off the top of his head, it calls our European-descended assumptions about romantic musical heroism into question.

In my opinion, this is all for the best. Music isn’t fundamentally about technique. It’s a transmission medium for emotions. A confident and definite performance comes across, accurate pitch or no. When you have a singer do take after take after take in search of technical perfection, you often end up with the sound of a bored and annoyed singer. Bored and annoyed singers are a drag to listen to, no matter how accurate a their pitch is. First takes are very often the best ones because of their freshness and immediacy. Cee-Lo Green’s spine-tingling lead vocal on Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was a first take. I don’t know how much postprocessing they did on Cee-Lo. Maybe it was none, maybe it was a lot. Who, aside from the people in the recording studio that day, cares?

A lot of people care, apparently. The music world is doing a lot of hand-wringing over Auto-tune right now. There’s a sense that it’s cheating somehow, and a few singers make a point to brag about not using it. I found this Neko Case quote from the Wikipedia article on pitch correction:

I’m not a perfect note hitter either but I’m not going to cover it up with auto tune. Everybody uses it, too. I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, “How many people don’t use auto tune?” and he said, “You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who’ve never used it in here.” Even though I’m not into Nelly Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It’s cool that she has some integrity.

Really? This makes Nelly Furtado cool? Personally, I find her music to be pretty lame, her strong pitch notwithstanding. Neko Case and Nelly Furtado might be “better” singers than Britney Spears when you hear them alone and unaccompanied in a room, but when are you ever likely to hear that? In their actual context of lavishly expensive production, Britney is by far my favorite singer of the three, because her style is suited to the realities of her musical context.

It’s way too late in the history of technology to be worrying about authenticity. What’s so authentic about recorded sound to begin with? Neko Case isn’t in the room singing when you plays an MP3 or CD or cassette or record of her. What’s so authentic about multitrack recording, compression, EQ, pop filters, artificial reverb, or selecting from multiple takes to find the best one? All that matters to me when I listen is how the music makes me feel. No amount of “authenticity” can make up for an untruthful or unimaginative musician. It isn’t Auto-tune that makes Lil Wayne and Kanye West so compelling. Those guys could find a way to do a hot track using a comb and wax paper. Conversely, Auto-tune can make bad singers less irritating, but it can’t make them sound exciting or memorable.

For my tastes, the most musical uses of Auto-tune come from contrasts. The extreme perfection works best when balanced by roughness and rawness elsewhere. One of my favorite tracks is M.I.A.’s otherworldly protest rap “20 Dollar.” Her wordless Cher-effect melismas are balanced by her loosely pitched uncorrected singing on the choruses and her unpitched rapping in the verses. Also, she layers distortion and reverb on top of the melismas to harshen them and remove their bubblegum quality.

Art is all about happy accidents, unintended consequences, serendipitous discoveries. Our feeble minds are nowhere near powerful enough to have good ideas just by wanting them. The first people to feed guitar amps back did it accidentally. It took the wisdom of Jimi Hendrix and his fellow hippie rockers to realize that this technical “mistake” could be the basis of new creativity. When you use Auto-tune’s Cher effect, it produces a clicky warble that sounds “bad” if you’re trying to have the effect be transparent. But the warble has a delightful set of qualities of its own. It introduces new rhythms into previously rhythmless sustained notes. If you add a little digital delay, the warble locks satisfyingly into the beat of the song. By flattening the vertical pitch aspect of a singer’s voice, Auto-tune draws out the horizontal qualities, the vibrato (as opposed to tremolo), the nasalness vs throatiness, the overtones and partials. A quick fillip to a neighboring chord tone that would normally pass unnoticed by singer and listener alike suddenly takes on dramatic musical significance when exaggerated by Auto-tune.

My favorite sound on Barbara is a blend of multiple different Auto-tune settings on the same vocal. We’ll have the same vocal playing on several tracks simultaneously, with one totally dry, one Auto-tuned to the scale of the song, and one Auto-tuned to just the root and fifth of the key for nice wide warbles.

We’ve only just begun to explore the qualites of Auto-tuned whispering, whistling and growling.

My sister Molly was visiting during one of our recent band practices, and she spent some time horsing around with Babsy’s vocal setup. She observed that Auto-tune is the best karaoke device in history. Molly is a terrific singer, but like most of us, she suffers from self-consciousness. By making it impossible for her to sound bad, Auto-tune liberated her playful musicality. Auto-tune inspires fearlessness, which inspires improvisation, which produces fun for everyone in the room. What more could you ask from a music tool?

Update: I wrote a followup post on how Auto-tune helps you understand music theory, and another about Auto-tune The News.

Further update: This post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music-making.