Saturday, September 10, 2011
I’ve been lucky enough to experience heightened and altered consciousness from music making, listening and dancing. Chasing that feeling motivates me to keep making and studying music, in spite of the lousy pay. I’m reading a wonderful book right now by William Benzon called Beethoven’s Anvil. Benzon looks at the state of brain research and [...]
Thursday, August 18, 2011
The odds of your making a living performing your own material are small, vanishingly small. But there are a lot of ways to make a living in music. If you do succeed at the singer-songwriter path using the tips listed in the other answers, mazel tov. In the likelihood that the singer-songwriter-musician thing doesn’t pay [...]
I’m a huge stone age dork, so Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary about cave paintings was catnip for me.
“Ye-yeah” and “baby” are open-ended expressions of love, enthusiasm and general positive energy. They might be specifically directed at a loved one, but usually they’re directed at everyone and no one and have no particular meaning at all. Pop lyrics aren’t about conveying specific information. They’re about sound for the sake of sound. The voice [...]
To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in [...]
I’m mostly glad to see the album go the way of the buggy whip. It’s rare that a band can get two or three decent songs together, much less eleven or twelve sequenced in a thoughtful way. Not everything that gets released is Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. I’m relieved to be able to [...]
I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, [...]
Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There’s a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication. Read about it here: Humans’ success as a species is due entirely to our social organization, and [...]
Since it was Easter yesterday, Anna wanted to listen to Bach’s St Matthew Passion while we pottered around the house. A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” — in English, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged bach, classical, easter, folk, genealogy, hymns, memes, paul simon
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If you’re a guitarist, you may have noticed that it’s hard to get your instrument perfectly in tune. This is not your imagination. If you tune each string perfectly to the one next to it, the low E string will end up out of tune with the high E string. If you use an electronic [...]
Filed in Math, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged autotune, guitar, harmonics, harmony, history, Math, Music Theory, tuning
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