Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music tech and songwriting students. 

This song was famously assembled in the studio from multiple takes, and its production is quite complicated. Like many later Beatles psychedelic masterpieces, this ended up being more a piece of electronic music than rock. But before we get into the production of the track, let’s talk about the “notes on the page” aspect of the song. John Lennon is very good at making unconventional songwriting ideas sound intuitive and inevitable.

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Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues

There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41.

Before we can get into the details of this note and what makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.

Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading

Aural Skills for Audio Engineers

Montclair State University asked me to develop and possibly teach a class on aural skills for audio engineers. It’s a great idea! It isn’t just audio engineers who need to know what frequencies and decibels are. These are concepts that any musician would benefit from knowing.

The internal ear

Here’s my first pass at a course outline. The main problem is that this is five semesters worth of material, so I’m sure some of it (a lot of it) will get cut. But these are the things I would want to cover in an ideal world.

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The best guitar solo ever recorded

The best guitar solo ever recorded is in Prince’s 1986 classic “Kiss.” Don’t be fooled by Wendy Melvoin’s mimed guitar playing in the video; Prince himself played the solo.

It might seem unfair that one of the best singers, songwriters, dancers, bandleaders and producers in history should also have played history’s best guitar solo, but, well, facts are facts.

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Two hundred Disquiet Junto submissions

Since January 2012, I have created over two hundred (!) pieces of music for the Disquiet Junto. That represents thirteen hours of recordings, which is more music than I have produced for every other creative undertaking in my life combined. In honor of this milestone, I’ve compiled my best submissions on Bandcamp.

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Brian Eno and the role of the producer

The meaning of the word “producer” has changed significantly over the history of recorded music. Before the 1960s, most record producers were businesspeople, responsible for signing checks and making sure the musicians and engineers did their jobs. Some producers took a creative role in choosing repertoire, arrangements and takes, but others were hands-off. As recording technologies and processes became more complex and further removed from documenting real-time performances, producers started to take on more creative importance. Consider George Martin’s role with the Beatles. For the first few albums, he simply supervised the recording process, but as time went on, he began to write and conduct orchestral arrangements, play instruments, and carry out technical experiments with the band and engineers.

In the 1970s, more artists started to think of the recording studio itself as an instrument, assembling tracks into collages that sometimes bore little resemblance to the original live performances. An album like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was as much a creation of the producers and engineers as the songwriters and musicians. As they started “playing the studio,” album producers became less like film producers and more like film directors. (Meanwhile, recorded music became less like filmed stage plays and more like Pixar or Star Wars movies.)

Brian Eno is a crucial figure in this evolution. It’s significant that his background is in visual art, not music. (Many British rock and pop musicians got started in art school.) Eno has described himself as a “non-musician.” He initially thought of himself as a conceptual artist more than anything. As a student, he experimented with electronic music under the influence of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but he approached these projects as sound art, not as “music” necessarily.

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The fake and the real in Chance the Rapper’s “All We Got”

[I wrote this before Kanye went full MAGA; I have since lost some enthusiasm for him.]

Every semester in Intro to Music Tech, we have Kanye West Day, when we listen analytically to some of Yeezy’s most sonically adventurous tracks (there are many to choose from.) The past few semesters, Kanye West Day has centered on “Ultralight Beam,” especially Chance The Rapper’s devastating verse. That has naturally led to a look at Chance’s “All We Got.”

All the themes of the class are here: the creative process in the studio, “fake” versus “real” sounds, structure versus improvisation, predictability versus surprise, and the way that soundscape and groove do much more expressive work than melody or harmony.

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My music technology syllabus

This is now out of date, see the current version

I use variations on this project list for all of my courses. In Advanced Digital Audio Production at Montclair State University, students do all of these assignments. Students in Music Technology 101 do all of them except the ones marked Advanced. My syllabus for the NYU Music Education Technology Practicum has an additional recording studio project in place of the final project. Here’s the project list in Google Spreadsheet format.

Music Ed Tech Practicum image

I talk very little about microphone technology or technique in my classes. This is because I find this information to only be useful in the context of actual recording studio work, and my classes do not have regular access to a studio. I do spend one class period on home recording with the SM58 and SM57, and talk a bit about mic technique for singers. I encourage students who want to go deeper into audio recording to take a class specifically on that subject, or to read something like the Moylan book.

My project-based approach is informed strongly by Matt Mclean and Alex Ruthmann. Read more about their methods here.

I do not require any text. However, for education majors, I strongly recommend Teaching Music Through Composition by Barbara Freedman and Music Technology and Education: Amplifying Musicality by Andrew Brown.

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Chance the Rapper’s verse on “Ultralight Beam”

One of my favorite guest verses in all of hip-hop is the one that Chance The Rapper does on Kanye West’s beautiful “Ultralight Beam.”

The song is built around an eight bar loop. (See this post for an analysis of the chord progression.) Chance’s verse goes through the loop five times, for a total of forty bars. It’s not at all typical for a rap song to include a one and a half minute guest verse–it’s almost enough material to make a whole separate song. By ceding so much space in his album opener, Kanye has given Chance the strongest endorsement possible, and Chance makes the most of his moment.

Chance The Rapper

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