Before “Believe,” Auto-tune was used for its intended purpose: to correct vocal performances in a natural-sounding, transparent way. Cher’s producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they turned the Retune Speed setting to zero, it produced the futuristic robot sound we’ve all come to know well. Since they were producing a high-tech dance track, they figured that the robot sound fit the mood, so they kept it in.

I doubt that Taylor and Rawling were the first people to discover the zero retune speed setting, but they were the first to use it on a mass-market commercial recording. To keep other people from imitating the sound, they told interviewers that they had achieved the effect with a vocoder. The music press repeated their story endlessly, so to this day there’s widespread confusion about the difference between vocoder and Auto-tune.

Original question on Quora

Jazz was popular when it was intimately connected to popular culture. In the early-middle part of the twentieth century, jazz was popular culture. The last significant jazz work to really communicate with pop music was “Rockit” by Herbie Hancock.

That song was informed by hip-hop and electronica, but it also gave something back — a generation of hip-hop turntablists all point to it as a central inspiration. Jazz since then has mostly tried to ignore pop culture entirely, or comment on it condescendingly.

Most jazz being produced now isn’t popular because it isn’t that good. It’s plenty complex and intellectual, but complexity isn’t coextensive with quality. People don’t listen to music to be dazzled by technique unless they’re in music school. It’s a rare contemporary jazz musician who can write a melody you’d want to hear more than once, and listening to people run difficult changes is about as interesting as watching them play video games.

In order for jazz to be popular, it needs to humble itself before the major improvisational art form of this generation: hip-hop. Jazz snobs that belittle hip-hop’s simplicity are missing the point. What hip-hop loses in harmony and melody, it more than makes up for in sonic innovation, wordplay, social realism and a sense of fun. Remember when jazz was fun? Remember when you could dance to it? Remember when it spoke to the emotional reality that most people live in? Or any emotional reality? That’s what jazz needs.

Here are two suggested directions for the future:

Verve Remixed

This series produced some excellent electronic music in its own right, brought a bunch of classic recordings to a whole new set of years, and opened a lot of jazz fans’ ears to contemporary music. Quite an achievement! I wish every jazz label would fling the vaults open to remixers, and not just the pros. I remix jazz tunes anyway, but it would be nice to have the labels’ blessing, rather than having to watch my back for lawsuits.

Reggie Watts

Even though he’s supposedly a comedian, Reggie Watts comes closer to the real spirit of jazz than any contemporary jazz musician I can think of. His songs are completely improvised, but rather than sounding like free-jazz mush, they’re tightly structured, catchy and funny. Instead of trying to sound like it’s still 1959, I wish more jazz musicians could live in the present culture like Reggie does.

Original post on Quora

The Facebook page lists about eleven billion examples of The Lick. Here are some of my favorites.

Miles Davis, “Two Bass Hit” — John Coltrane plays it at 1:15 and 1:39.

John Coltrane, “Impressions” — listen at 3:11.

Coltrane again, “On Green Dolphin Street,” at 1:32.

Freddie Hubbard playing “A Love Supreme” at a Coltrane tribute concert — 0:16.

Sonny Rollins on Miles Davis’ “It’s Only A Paper Moon” at 2:25.

Sonny Rollins, “John S” at 1:51.

Grant Green, “Nomad” — Bobby Hutcherson plays The Lick at 4:12, 4:46 and 4:53.

Charles Mingus, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” — Joe Gardner at 1:34.

The Lick doesn’t just belong to jazz. Stravinsky uses it in “The Fire Bird” — listen at 14:43.

The Lick is a pop and rock staple too. Player uses a variant of it in “Baby Come Back” — listen at 0:13.

Santana plays yet another variant in “Oye Como Va” — listen at 0:17.

Akon sings The Lick right at the beginning of “Just A Man.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of four versions of The Lick, all transposed to A minor for clarity.

These few variations on The Lick only hint at the richness of explosive diversity you can find on the Facebook page. The Lick is one of those musical memes, like the Amen break or the “Egyptian” melody, that can adapt itself to a seemingly limitless variety of circumstances. There’s a lot of debate on FB about whether a given phrase counts as The Lick or not, since many of the examples stretch the time or alter the pitches, or both. These debates are a lot like the ones biologists get into around taxonomic issues, whether a given fossil is a dinosaur or a bird. The Lick mutates and evolves exactly like a gene in a population of organisms. You can think of The Lick as being like a single gene that codes for a single protein, functioning as part of a larger musical genome, a tune or a solo.

We come down hard on artists who use cliches too much, and praise others for originality. But if iconoclastic musicians on the level of Coltrane use The Lick so heavily, how bad can cliches be? Too much originality is an obstacle to creating emotionally resonant music. Coltrane’s last albums were by far his most original — you’re not going to hear too many cliches on Ascension or Sun Ship. But I find those albums challenging at best, and most people find them unbearable. Coltrane’s best art is based on familiar materials — showtunes, folk music, the blues. The best art doesn’t avoid cliches; it owns them, personalizes them and transforms them. I say, long live The Lick.

I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book Beethoven’s Anvil. The context is a discussion of a Louis Armstrong recording from 1928 called “Tight Like This.” Listen at 2:04 as Louis quotes the “Egyptian” melody and varies it a few times.

Benzon knows the Egyptian melody from childhood. He quotes different sets of lyrics, such as:

All the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,
and the way they shake is enough to kill a snake

Another variation:

On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.
Every puff they take is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head.
When the flowers die they say 1969!

The tune has been known in America as the “hookie-kookie dance” or the “hoochie-coochie dance.” It came to fame when it accompanied a belly dancer at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, and afterwards it became something of a hit. The melody was copyrighted under various names early in the 20th century, including “Dance Of The Midway,” “Coochi-Coochi Polka” and “The Streets Of Cairo.” (Thank you, Eunji Choi, for pointing me to this last tune’s Wikipedia page.)

The Egyptian melody appears in the widely-studied Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method For Trumpet from 1864, under the title “Arabian Song.” Arban almost certainly didn’t write it; it’s one of many “representative ethnic songs” in the book learned from the folk tradition. The tune is related to an Arabic or Algerian melody called “Kradoutja” that had been circulating around France since the 1600s. Who knows if the tune in Arban’s book is an actual middle eastern folk song, or a European mutation of “Kradoutja,” or what.

The Egyptian melody also gets quoted a lot in performances of “Sheik of Araby,” for example as performed here by the Beatles for their unsuccessful Decca audition in 1962.

Steve Martin uses the melody at the beginning of “King Tut.” (no embedding.)

They Might Be Giants use the tune in “Istanbul” for the line “Even old New York was once New Amsterdam.”

A more recent quotation — “Who’s That? Brooown!” by Das Racist:

This story is a perfect illustration of how musical memes evolve the way organisms do. It has a similar evolutionary history to the “Asian riff,” another stereotypically ethnic musical meme.

Original post on Quora

Manu Dibango released “Soul Makossa” in 1972. He wrote it as the B-side to “Mouvement Ewondo,” a praise song for the Cameroonian football team on the occasion of the 1972 Tropics Cup. Language Log explains the chant-like lyrics:

The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

Duala is spoken in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, which has long been a musical hotbed. Since the 1960s, Cameroonian pop music has been dominated by a rhythmic style of dance music from Douala known as makossa. The Duala word makossa is often glossed as “(I) dance” (as in this article by Cameroonian linguist George Echu). The entry for makossa in the Oxford English Dictionary further explains that makossa is “derivative of kosa ‘to peel or remove the skin of (a fruit or vegetable)’; the name refers to the twisting and shaking movements of the dancer.”

Language Log quotes this excerpt of Dibango’s autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee:

On one side of the 45 I recorded the hymn [praise song]; on the other I recorded “Soul Makossa,” written using a traditional makossa rhythm with a little soul thrown in. In my Douala neighborhood, at my parents’ house, I rehearsed this second piece. The house had no air-conditioning, and the windows were wide open. All the kids flocked around. Hearing me rehearse, they fell over laughing. Unbelievable — how on earth had I concocted that mishmash? Poor makossa really took a blow. My father was astonished: “Can’t you pronounce ‘makossa’ like everyone else? You stutter: ‘mamako mamasa.’ You think they’re going to accept that in Yaoundé?” The Cup organizing committee reacted the same way. The march on side one they found “impeccable.” But the other side… “Really, Manu has gone nuts. What possesses him to stutter like that?”

The New York DJ and party promoter David Mancuso got his hands on “Soul Makossa” and played it incessantly at his loft parties. The song became an underground hit, especially when it started getting airplay on WBLS. The few copies floating around New York were quickly snapped up by other DJs. Several bands rushed out their own covers to fill the gap, most notably Baba Olatunji and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. Their versions are fun, but nowhere near as funky as the original. Finally, Atlantic Records released Manu Dibango’s version on one of their sub-labels, and it went so far as to crack the top 40 in 1973.

Soul Makossa quotes, samples and remixes

Quoting “Soul Makossa” became something of a trope in the early eighties, ranging from subtle references to the beat or bassline or horn line to full-blown quotation. My favorite example is by Nairobi featuring the Awesome Foursome.

This song just screams 1982, especially with those 808 cowbells. This song was itself sampled in many other songs, including Schoolly D’s “Mama Feel Good.”

Kool Moe Dee’s “Pump Your Fist” draws on “Soul Makossa” for percussion, the wah guitar stab and part of the main sax riff.

A more recent example: “Latinhead” by Dirty Beatniks.

Soul Makossa has also been sampled by Jay-Z, Geto Boys, Poor Righteous Teachers and A Tribe Called Quest, among many others. See a full list of samples.

Michael Jackson and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

By far the most famous musical descendant of “Soul Makossa” is Michael Jackson’s first single from Thriller, the best song on that album and a strong contender for the best song of the eighties, period.

I was at a hippie-ish wedding this past summer. People were having a good time, but not really dancing. Then “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” came up on the iPod and the party suddenly jumped off. Little kids, old folks, everyone in between, people were getting down. Say what you want about Michael Jackson as a human being, but there’s no denying the power of this song. It never fails to get people shaking their butts, across all ages, races, classes and cultural backgrounds.

The copyright-minded among you might well ask: did MJ steal the Makossa chant? Manu Dibango certainly thought so, and sued MJ, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement. The issue isn’t a cut-and-dried one for me, though. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two chants:

The most obvious difference is in the syllables, but there are musical differences too. Manu Dibango’s chant is a two-bar phrase sung/chanted entirely on the note G, over an unchanging G7 chord. Michael Jackson’s chant is a four-bar phrase with a call and response structure. He adds a two-note melody harmonized in thirds and a chord progression alternating between D/E and E7. MJ also uses a little more syncopation. I’d say that MJ’s chant is more of an adaptation than a direct theft.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” quotes, samples and remixes

Pop and hip-hop musicians quote MJ’s version of the Makossa chant incessantly. Some high-profile examples:

• “No Clause 28” by Boy George
• “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith
• “Cowboys” by the Fugees
• “Brooklyn Girls” by Charles Hamilton
• “Lost In The World” by Kanye West

People love to shout out the chant during live performances, too, everyone from Zap Mama to Jamie Foxx. Rihanna goes further than quoting MJ’s chant; she builds an entire dance track around a reharmonized sample of it. MJ’s song is in the key of E, but Rihanna’s producers put it in the key of F# minor. This is hip stuff; the same notes in MJ’s sunny and uplifting coda become melancholy in Rihanna’s track.

People quote other parts of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” too. Big Daddy Kane quotes the “Yeah yeah” part in “Warm It Up Kane,” listen at 1:32.

Other tracks quoting this phrase include “Vibin’ (The New Flava Remix)” by Boyz II Men and Busta Rhymes featuring Treach, Craig Mack and Method Man, and “Feels So Good” by Mase.

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz adapt big swaths of MJ’s song in “Startin’ Something.”

Björk has to be different, of course, so she (mis)quotes the opening line of MJ’s song in live versions of “I Go Humble.” And by the way, her MJ fandom was apparently reciprocal, if this radio show transcript is to be believed.

Visualizing the Makossa diaspora

Here’s a complete map of the genealogy of the Makossa chant; click to enlarge.

Putting it all together

Here’s a mashup I made combining several of the tracks mentioned above so you can get your makossa on.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Any noteworthy sightings of the Makossa meme that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Hat tip to Mike Devlin for coining the phrase “Makossa diaspora.”

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

Duke Ellington – “Half The Fun”

Paired with an incredible Sam Woodyard drum part. I love sampling it:

Nature Boy megamix by ethanhein

Duke Ellington – “Fleurette Africaine”

Charles Mingus’ strumming on the intro might be the most beautiful few bars he ever played. Hear a mashup I did of this tune and some other jazz classics:

Autumn Leaves by ethanhein

The Beatles – “Dear Prudence”

I could have chosen any of a dozen Beatles tunes here, I love those McCartney lines. But this one has the most emotional power for me. Here’s a blog post about it, and here’s a mashup I did of “Dear Prudence” with “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5:

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time”

From my favorite of Miles’ funk albums. Read a blog post about it.

James Brown – “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”

Pretty sure that’s Bootsy Collins playing bass, and he kills it.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”

Here’s a visualization I made of this loop.

Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”

Read more about this track, and check out the megamix:

Once In A Lifetime megamix by ethanhein

Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”

Of course.

Janet Jackson – “What Have You Done For Me Lately”

The song that made the Latelybass sound famous.

Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes”

Bakithi Kumalo on the fretless makes this tune for me.

Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”

Love those Teddy Riley sequenced lines.

Digable Planets – “Rebirth Of Slick”

The bassline is sampled from “Searchin’” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but the Digables flipped it into something new.

Black Sheep – “The Choice Is Yours”

Another creative flip of a jazz sample, from McCoy Tyner’s recording of “Impressions.”

Morphine – “Buena”

No embedding; click the image to hear the song:

Two-string slide bass and baritone sax!

Daft Punk – “Around The World”

Never get tired of this one.

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Kanye has been using tuned 808 kick drums to play his basslines lately, which is a dazzlingly hip idea. The kick and the bass are supposed to be in tight sync anyway; why not just fuse them into a single part? I know he’s a ridiculous human being in a lot of ways but the man knows how to put a track together.

Let me know if I missed anything critical, I’m sure I did.

Original post on Quora

DJ BC also did a remarkable album-length mashup of Jay-Z and Brian Eno:

Speaking of Jay, it’s a cliche by now, but Danger Mouse’s Grey Album really is a remarkable piece of work.

For creative use of pop, you’ve got to love DJ Earworm’s United State Of Pop series.

Diplo and M.I.A. deserve props for Piracy Funds Terrorism, especially their reworking of “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

The Walsh brothers did the best Wu-Tang mashup I’ve ever heard: Wugazi!

Finally, I don’t know if I’m one of the best mashup artists, but I’m pretty darn good.

Mashups by ethanhein

Additional recommendations are welcome in the comments.

Original post on Quora

While Girl Talk tracks have way too much information in them for my tastes, I could easily imagine having a rich musical life just unpacking their possibilities. Pop-oriented hip-hop over thrash metal! Gangsta rap over buttery piano ballads! Mixing prog and teeny bopper pop and classic rock! Teasing out the ideas suggested in these pairings could launch a thousand bands. In my own life as a musician, mashups have been the richest source of inspiration imaginable. Girl Talk lights the way with his fearless transgression of all boundaries of taste and style and copyright; it’s up to older and mellower musicians like me to pick up all the loose and tangled threads and knit them into something a little more coherent and structured.

Mashups by ethanhein

Why do some people like Girl Talk?

By this theory, the most widespread songs will be the ones that get themselves copied for whatever reason, whether they’re welcome to their human hosts or not. It’s no mystery that I find Duke Ellington melodies catchy, I love his music more than anything. But I intensely dislike Andrew Lloyd Webber, yet I find his songs even catchier than Ellington’s. This demands an explanation.

In my observation, the stickiest songs are the ones most finely tuned to the limits of your attention span and pattern-seeking tools. Earworms are mostly predictable and repetitive, but just complex and surprising enough to stimulate your pattern-seeking reflex. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is easy to memorize, but the brain “solves” it so quickly that it doesn’t linger endlessly the way Andrew Lloyd Webber songs do. Ellington tunes are repetitive too, but the main motifs are more complex, requiring more attention, and eventually they wear your pattern recognizers out.

The interesting and potentially useful thing about the meme theory of music is that it suggests you can measure the catchiness of a song by the amount of symmetry it contains. Too little symmetry and the song will be too complicated to be memorable. Too much symmetry and your brain will solve the pattern immediately and lose interest. I leave it to the math people how to formalize these parameters, but I’ve known musicians to try to work them out in an ad hoc way. I have a friend from college (a big Andrew Lloyd Webber fan, by the way) who deliberately set out to write catchy tunes. He’d sit at the piano in the student center playing material he was working on. Then he’d go hang around the nearby snack bar. If anyone there was unconsciously humming what he’d just been playing, he knew he had a winner.

Original post on Quora

The good news is that while figuring out keys is complex, it’s not impossible. Before you can do it, you need to know what all the possibilities are, and you need some tools to help you in your analysis. I’m assuming here that you don’t have sheet music of the tune you’re trying to figure out, but you do have an audio recording. You’ll want a program that can loop and slow down different sections. I recommend Transcribe for this purpose. Audio editing tools like Ableton Live and Pro Tools work too.

Figuring out the root

The root is “home base” for the key. The best way to figure it out is trial and error. There are only twelve possibilities; put the passage on a loop and try them all. Often the root is the note that the melody starts or ends on, or repeats frequently. The root is also the likeliest note for the bass to be playing. Neither of these are hard and fast rules, though; you need to let your ear be the final judge. A teacher can help you develop your instinct through ear training.

Simple major and minor

In traditional western classical and folk music, figuring out keys is relatively straightforward. There are twelve major keys and twelve minor keys. If the piece or section feels happy, it’s probably major, and if it feels sad, it’s probably minor. Once you’ve figured out the root, you’re in business. The key signatures in western notation denote either major scales or their relative minor counterparts.

Jazz theory gives another handy method for identifying keys. In jazz, keys tend to change a lot, and it’s not uncommon to pass through a key without ever landing on the root. Many jazz standards have sequences of ii-V progressions that don’t resolve. For example:

| C-7 F7 | Bb-7 Eb7 | Ab-7 Db7 | G-7 C7 |

How do you make sense of something so complex? Jazz says: look at the dominant seventh chords. Whenever you see one, you’re in the key one slot counterclockwise on the circle of fifths.

So in the example, F7 indicates that the first bar is in Bb major — you can play the Bb major scale over C-7 and F7 and it will sound good. The Eb7 indicates that the second bar is in Ab major. The Db7 puts the third bar in Gb major, and the C7 puts the fourth bar in F major.

Dominant chords can indicate minor keys if they have “minor-sounding” extensions in them like b9, #9 and b13. Half-diminished ii chords suggest minor keys too. So if you see this:

| C-7b5 F7b9 | Bb-7b5 Eb7#9 | Ab-7b5 Db7b9 | G-7b5 C7#9 |

then you’re looking at the keys of Bb minor, Ab minor,  Gb minor and F minor, respectively. See a good jazz theory text for more details; I recommend The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine.

The blues

Blues music makes the key situation more complex, because it combines features of both major and minor. Blues mixes the major and minor third, the natural and flat seventh, and characteristically major-key and minor-key chords. Also, blues uses dominant seventh chords in non-functional ways, so you can’t really use the jazz analysis on them. I think it’s best to think of “blues keys” that are distinct from major or minor. So the key of “C blues” will use chords like this:

C7  Eb  F7  F#dim7  G7  Bb

Melodies in C blues will combine C major and the C blues scale. There’s also minor blues, but that follows traditional classical minor-key rules more closely.

Modes and other exotica

Major, minor and blues will cover you for most of the material you’ll encounter in western pop, but there are still some tunes and passages that will continue to defy analysis. Music from non-western cultures uses plenty of scales not mentioned above, and western practice has absorbed a lot of them, especially the ones that happen to map onto modes of the major scale. Western music also occasionally ventures into modes of the harmonic and melodic minor scales.

There are also the so-called synthetic scales: whole-tone and diminished. It’s vanishingly unusual to hear them in pop songs, but they do show up in jazz, classical and film score music. Hollywood leans heavily on a scale I learned as “harmonic major” — like harmonic minor but with a major third:

C D E F G Ab B

This scale is rarely discussed in music theory texts, but it’s handy if you want to create a feeling of epic mysticism, like in the Lord Of The Rings movies.

Putting it all together

This flowchart shows all of the scales you’re likely to encounter in contemporary American music, at least the more mainstream and accessible stuff. Find yourself a piece of music whose root is C. Try out different notes on top of it and follow the arrows until you hit your scale.

For example, let’s take “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” by Hall and Oates.

Take a listen to the verses. The root is C. There’s G in there, whereas Gb sounds peculiar. The section is minor, so Eb fits and E doesn’t. Continuing out, Bb fits better than B, and A fits better than Ab. So the key here is C dorian. The prechorus — “I’d do anything you want me to do” — is more complicated. It has C and G, and the third is E, rather than Eb. But the different chords in that section use both B and Bb. The prechorus switches back and forth between C major and C mixolydian. See what I mean about key changes being common?

If you’re trying to figure out something and the root isn’t C, my chart won’t be much help unless you transpose everything. Someone want to commission me to do this chart in all twelve keys? Get in touch.

Music theory excites nerds like me, but it makes a lot of musicians miserable. It’s best to learn it in the context of actual tunes that you like. Each scale has its own unique emotional color; puzzling them all out and comparing their qualities can be great inspiration for writing and improvising your own stuff. Happy transcribing!