Music notation

Western music notation is a venerable method of visualizing music. It’s a very neat and compact system, unambiguous and digital, and not too difficult to learn. Programs like Sibelius can effortlessly translate notation to and from MIDI data, too.

But western notation has some limitations, especially for contemporary music. It doesn’t handle microtones well. It has limited ability to convey performative nuance — after a hundred years of jazz, there’s no good way to notate swing other than to just write the word “swing” at the top of the score. The key signature system works fine for major keys, but is less helpful for minor keys and modal music and is pretty much worthless for the blues.

Here’s a suggestion for how notation could improve in the future. It’s a visualization by Jon Snydal of John Coltrane’s solo in Miles Davis’ “All Blues”  (I edited it a little to be easier on the eyes.)

Snydal’s visualization is more analog than digital — it shows the exact nuances of Coltrane’s performance, with subtle shadings of pitch, timing and dynamics.

MIDI sequencers suggest further improvements over standard notation. Here’s a simplified electronic music sequencer called iNudge. Play, it’s fun:

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s tune “Four In One” as shown in standard MIDI “piano roll” view. The rectangles show not only which notes are being played and when, but exactly how long they’re held. Darker red means louder, paler pink means quieter. You can also read volume off the bars along the bottom.

MIDI is a versatile and user-friendly system. It can capture your keyboard performances, you can import scores, and you can even just draw notes onto the screen directly (my preferred method.)

The Music Animation Machine has a wonderful series of videos matching MIDI piano rolls of various classical pieces with recordings of them. Here’s Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

As software gets more sophisticated in its ability to extract pitch data from actual audio recordings, you can start manipulating them with the same ease as MIDI. Here’s a screencap of the pitch-correction program Melodyne, a close cousin of Auto-tune.

The lines show the actual sung pitches, and the orange blobs show the notes the program thinks the singer meant to hit. The blobs’ thickness shows volume. You can drag and drop the blobs and redraw the lines at will to alter the melody to your heart’s content. Melodyne even transcribes the performance to standard notation and MIDI for you.

High and low

We’ve made up our collective mind that faster frequencies should be spatially represented as being “higher,” and that slower ones should be spatially “lower.” It seems so reasonable, but really it’s totally arbitrary, and doesn’t even line up with physical experience. On the piano, the high notes are on the right and the low ones on the left. On the guitar, the “low” E string is physically located above the “high” one. The fingerings for higher and lower notes on wind instruments don’t correspond to a simple higher-lower axis either.

Absolute pitch is a straight line ladder, but pitch class is circular. The truest representation of pitch space is a helix.

Other ways to conceptualize pitch space

High and low aren’t the only metaphors we use for faster and slower vibrations. Like I said, pitch class is circular.

But the circle is really just replacing up/down with clockwise/counterclockwise. There are other ways to conceptualize pitch. We intuitively experience changing pitches as moving closer and further, or inwards and outwards. We also think of higher pitches as brighter and lower pitches as darker. Players of stringed instruments sometimes tune their upper strings a little bit too high on purpose, producing an effect known as brilliance.

Time

It’s a universal convention that notation shows time moving from left to right. But that’s not the only possible axis to use. How about forwards and backwards instead? That’s the paradigm in rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. The purest realization of this concept is in a game called FreQuency.

The game even allows you to construct your own remixes.

I like this tunnel metaphor and would like to see it extended into a full-blown production environment.

Waves

Pitches are sine-wave vibrations, and you can visualize them as such.

Sine waves wouldn’t make for very a helpful music notation, but they do help you understand what’s going on scientifically when you physically hear something. They’re even better animated:

See all of Wikipedia’s animated drum heads.

Waveforms

Audio editors show music as amplitude waveforms, blobs that get wider where the sound is louder. Here’s the Funky Drummer break in Recycle. The blue blobs show drum hits. These amplitude blobs don’t tell you much about the musical content except for timing and volume. But Recycle was meant for drum loops, where timing and volume are the only information you really need.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the Funky Drummer as it’s looping:

In a post on Design Observer, Rob Walker discusses the waveform as the new icon for music, replacing the stylized eighth notes or records that have done the job in the past. The SoundCloud player uses an attractive waveform graphic that helps the listener track where they are in the song by following the volume peaks. There’s even a SoundCloud group called Pretty Waveforms.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

The waveform has the potential to move from purely functional settings to more decorative ones. Here’s a waveform-based labeling concept by Joshua Distler, showing the tracks on Post by Björk.

Music theory and networks

I’ve always thought it would be cool to use networks to conceptualize music theory, and have made a few attempts at doing so. Here’s a comparison between the circle of half-steps and the circle of fifths, which are involutes of each other:

Here’s a map of the chord progressions in “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

And here’s a flowchart showing how you can figure out what scale or mode you’re hearing.

It would be way cooler to have more abstract three-dimensional interactive visualizations showing how chords, scales and melodies function. Leonhard Euler showed how you can represent tonal harmony as a lattice with the topology of a torus, as shown in this animation. Red lines show major thirds, green lines show minor thirds, and blue lines show fifths:

I have ambitions of my own in this area, but so far, I lack the programming skills to realize them. Others are taking some exciting strides, though. Dmitri Tymoczko made waves for getting the first music-related article published in Science about his topological visualization methods for tonal harmony. I can’t quite wrap my head around his ideas, but they’re intriguing.

Here’s an illustration by Aniruddh Patel from his paper, “Language, Music, Syntax And The Brain.” Again, I’m not totally clear what it all means, but I plan to investigate further.

Other theorists have attempted to use color to show harmonic function. Scriabin invented a “keyboard of lights” for that purpose, though it didn’t really catch on.

Visualizing musical form and structure

I like to use simple color-coding to keep track of which section is which while working on a song. Yellow is for intros and outtros, blue is for verses, green is for choruses and orange is for instrumentals and breakdowns.

Edward Tufte shows some more sophisticated song structure visualizations on his forum:

The Shape of Song project by Martin Wattenburg shows repetition within a piece of music. Here’s his visualization of “Like A Prayer” by Madonna.

Here’s Wattenburg’s visualization of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

Speculation

Here’s an entertaining video showing how you can create a happening drum machine sequence using counting in binary by Niklas Roy.

Wouldn’t this graph coloring system make a cool music notation or interface?

Visual Complexity has many more ideas like this one.

I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of useful and attractive schemes. Are there other cool visualization methods I should know about? Hit the comments.

Updates

John Clover hipped me to this post, which overlaps heavily: Amazing Music Visualizations and Teaching

I just had the chance to play with some of Björk‘s Biophilia song/apps. Some of them are groundbreaking interactive visualizations; some are just entertaining and groovy; some are baffling but deserve points for creativity. All the way around, it’s a remarkable experiment, one that I think is going to be influential.

See this post on Quora

From left to right, you’re seeing an Mbox, the audio interface that goes with Pro Tools. We plug the vocal mic into it so that the computer can perform its magic, like Auto-tune and compression. Next is a little mixer sitting on top of a headphone amp. Then there’s Babsy’s laptop running one of our Pro Tools files, showing some of the backing vocals she’ll be singing over. On the right is a Line 6 Pod, a guitar effects unit and amp modeler. It’s a lot easier to carry to gigs than a real amp. Using a fake amp modeler isn’t very rock and roll but it fits perfectly with the spirit of electronica. For the show we’re going to use two computers, Barbara’s to run Pro Tools, and mine for Reason synths and playback of ordinary audio files.

Using canned tracks causes me some residual philosophical angst. It lacks the risk-taking that jazz-trained cats like me associate with a good live performance. But sonically, accompanying ourselves with stuff we prerecorded and sequenced is a no-brainer. We want the tracks to sound a certain way. Doing our synth and sample-based sounds completely live would be either difficult or impossible. So our show is taking on the aspect of a highly skilled karaoke experience. This runs directly against the spirit of rock, jazz, country and most of the other music I’m trained in. But it fits in well with the music I’ve become most interested in lately, hip-hop, contemporary R&B and electronica. All of these styles use recordings in live performance heavily.

I’ve had a few different bands with Barbara at this point. We started out doing live techno remixes of pop and rock songs, mostly using preprogrammed beats. Then we entered our free improv period, combining a groovebox and live instrumentation to do a more electronic version of seventies Miles Davis. Now we’re back to pop, using very tightly structured songs with meticulous arrangements. We still use loose improvisation as a way to write during the recording process, but the finished product gets heavily edited, and most of the improv winds up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. I love improvising without a net in front of an audience, but the supply and demand equation for that kind of music isn’t too favorable. That’s as it should be. Unstructured jamming is more fun for the performers than the listeners, and our focus now is on making sure the audience has a good time. If you’re in NYC this Saturday night, come on down! We promise it’ll be fun on wheels.

Revival Revival vs Janet Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Right-click or option click the links to save the track to your computer.

There are as many different ways of writing songs as there are songwriters. Barbara Singer and I have arrived at a good one, so I figured I’d share it with you in the hopes you find it inspirational.

Like all of our tracks, “Boys And Dance Floors” began life as a string of looped samples in Reason. Here’s the sequencer window.

Each brick is eight bars of four-four time. The top two tracks are different samples of “What Have You Done For Me Lately” by Janet Jackson, just synth bass and drum machine. Both loops are the same basic groove, but with subtle differences: one has a backwards cymbal crash building up to the end and the other has a quiet crash at the beginning. The third track down is a sample of Barbara singing “Fire, fire” in an intense voice that we have filter sweeping in at the beginning and end of the song.

Peach is for the intros and outtro. Light blue is verses. Green is choruses, with the darker green as the prechorus and the lighter green as the chorus proper. Orange is for instrumental breaks and purple is the bridge. If we ever try to release this thing commercially, we’re either going to have to license the samples or program something else. Hope Janet’s people are willing to make a deal.

We built the song as a complete instrumental before adding any vocals. Barbara improvised several tracks of guitar over the beat, and then we went through, found the best licks, and copied and pasted them into phrases. The bassline is just a guitar part pitch-shifted down an octave.

We shuffled the sections around and layered them into verses, choruses and a bridge. Then we bounced the instrumental and spent a few weeks living with it. Barbara prefers driving around and listening to work in progress. I like having it on my ipod while going about my daily life, having it come up in shuffle, hearing it juxtaposed against our other tracks and whatever else is in the playlists.

Barbara “wrote” the vocal melody by recording some scat-singing and improvised nonsense syllables. She also did some recordings singing and playing live guitar with a drummer. We ended up using the cymbals from one of those recordings in our final track. Finally, Barbara sat down with all of the rough recordings and a legal pad and spent an hour sweating out lyrics while I hung out and read Facebook.

In cutting the final vocals it became apparent that the chorus melody worked better as the harmony part to a different, lower melody, so it took us a few passes to build that out. We ended up with a ton of overdubs on that part, nearly all of which stayed in for a nice thick sound. About half the vocal tracks have Auto-tune on the T-Pain setting, half are dry, and there’s one through guitar distortion for texture.

The songwriting process is a lot like cooking. Everyone has a preferred method. There nevertheless is a core set of best practices, and while you’re free to invent your own approach, some of the rules are inflexible. People have certain metabolic and sensual needs from food, and we have certain emotional needs for music. People like repetition and symmetry, but they like the patterns to break a little bit unpredictably. It’s a delicate balance. You want your song to be orderly and structured enough to be memorable, but it should be chaotic and open-ended enough to make each subsequent pass through it a lively experience.

You can assemble the components of your songs together in whatever order suits you. I’ve tried assembling the pieces in many different orders, and this is the one that produces the most consistent results for me:

1) The beat.

I prefer a literal beat, a sample like the Funky Drummer or a drum machine loop. The right hand part of guitar playing is good for figuring out beats. You can just tap your foot or hear beats in your head. But for the music I like, the beat has to be strong and definite, the foundation of everything else.

2) The key center.

Something I learned from hip-hop producers is that drum loops are usually strongly pitched. A lot of the time, the pitch of the kick drum establishes your key for you. Even if you end up using a different key, try tuning your drums so at least they’re on the fifth or somewhere similarly early in the overtone series.

The key might be as simple as a drone or as complex as the rapidly shifting harmonic progressions of classical or jazz. I myself prefer drones because I find key changes box me in, they inhibit improvisation and audience participation.

3) Some loops.

In my current practice I like to have literal loops, samples or copied and pasted pieces of recorded improvisation. When I write with an instrument, on paper or in my head, I’m still hunting for good loops, it’s just a different storage method. If there’s going to be a bassline, what are the bass loops? If there are going to be keyboards or guitar, what are the loops going to be there? Are there going to be repeated licks and countermelodies, chord progressions, percussion parts? Where do the loops stop and start?

4) A line.

The melody, or a chant, ideally vocal, or played on an instrument with vocal qualities. The focal point for the casual listener. In my jazz life I used to start with melodies and build around them, but now I find that too much like picking furniture and then trying to build a house around it.

5) Lyrics.

Outside of hip-hop, Cole Porter and the sixties folkies, I can take or leave lyrics. Humming, wordless vocalizing and scat singing work fine for me most of the time. There are plenty of songs I like where I can’t understand the lyrics at all. If there are going to be words, they have to make musical sense before semantic sense. Some of the best song lyrics are meaningless.

Lyrics do have the virtue of making a sung melody easier to remember. If you want to learn a bebop solo, see if there’s a version by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, it’ll be a lot easier. Like, I learned most of the solos in Freddie Freeloader thanks to Jon Hendricks’ version. Flatten out the melodies and update the slang and you have rapping.

As I argue at length in this post, I don’t believe much in originality in music. It’s easy to be unique, you always sound like you. But it’s hard to generate ideas that have never been used before. In my opinion, the quest for novelty is a waste of energy. It distracts from the hunt for what’s hot, right now. Even this “original” song by me and Barbara is composited together from pieces of existing music in our respective heads. It’s not just the Janet Jackson beat. The guitar parts are directly inspired by PJ Harvey and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Some of the vocal parts come from the Supremes, some from Britney Spears. Some of the production techniques come from Justin Timberlake, some from Daft Punk. It’s all a big collage.

But that’s us. How do you guys like to write?

Update: the KLF give a detailed and hilarious accounting of the writing of their number one hit from 1988, “Doctorin’ The Tardis.” They use mostly the same process I do.

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.

Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.

The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.

Hear the game controller in action on the synth in this track:

Take The 2-3 Train by ethanhein

The software maps the buttons and knobs on the controller to different MIDI values. I can play one octave of each of a few different scales (blues, major, harmonic and melodic minor, diminished) in all twelve keys. I can scroll through the circle of fifths with the controller’s D-pad. It’s set so that my left index and middle fingers control the root and third of the scale, my right index and middle control the fourth and fifth, and my right thumb reaches the rest of the scale tones. With the thumb sticks I can control pitch bend, modulation and other parameters, depending on which software instrument is dialed up.

The controller plays anything that any other MIDI instrument can play, not just synthesizers. I can map any batch of recorded sounds to the buttons. It’s fun loading bells or speech samples or bird calls onto it and playing them through heavy delay over a beat.

The controller interface software was written by Ben Lacker in Max/MSP. It works with any USB video game controller, but it was specifically designed for the one in the screenshot, a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.

I mostly played guitar in my bands through my twenties, using lots of digital delay and other high-tech effects. As my sound got more electronic I started using a keyboard hooked up to my laptop. For a while I was carrying around a Korg 49, which has a bunch of cool drum pads and control knobs in addition to a half-piano’s worth of keybs. It was way more controller than I needed. I felt kind of like a chump carrying such a big instrument around just to play one note while twiddling a knob for the entire song. Part of the motivation to set up the game controller was to be able to have the same control scheme on a device I could more easily carry around on the subway.

The Korg 49′s keys and drum pads are pressure-sensitive. The game controller isn’t. Its buttons have only has two settings, on and off. It offers no control of dynamics at all. This limitation has turned out to be mostly a good thing for live situations, and even for home sequencing. For samples especially, it sounds better to mix everything to a nice balance and then be forced to keep it that way. It moves my complete focus to rhythm. I can pitch bend or filter with the thumbsticks for expressiveness when I need it.

I’ve tried a few other game controllers with the MIDI interface program. Some of them show potential. The most intriguing one is the Dance Dance Revolution pad. It would be perfect if it didn’t map itself to strange MIDI parameters by default. Out of the box, half the buttons don’t do anything useful, and I don’t have the programming mojo to fix it. Maybe in the future I’ll get it ironed out. It could be like a customizable, more ergonomic version of the giant ground piano in Big, as seen in this extremely bootleg Youtube video.

The Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers have potential too, but they don’t have as many buttons or parameters as the Logitech pad. Same with the Taiko Drum Master controller. This is nothing against any of these controllers in their original contexts, where they work great. I haven’t gotten to try DJ Hero but I expect it’ll be a similar deal. The Nintendo Wii controller is becoming the game controller of choice for futuristic computer musicians. I haven’t used one for anything except games yet, but there are some cool-looking things on my list. Specifically, I’m looking forward to experimenting with Wii Loop Machine and Wii Drum High. There are also some groovy-looking things for the Game Boy DS, like Korg DS-10 and Nitrotracker. For all of the above plus iPhone there’s a thing called Osculator that looks fun.

Vocalist Dieter Meier recorded the words “oh oh, chicka chicka” and “oh yeah” at a relatively normal pitch into the sampler, and keyboardist Boris Blank played them back lower and slowed down. There are also some cool sampled Tarzan yells and Lord Of The Rings synthesized men’s chorus. This track could have been recorded last week.

We think of sampling as this high-tech modern practice, but analog sampling keyboards go back to the early fifties. The first one was the Chamberlin. It played short tape recordings of a few different instruments when you pressed the keys. The Chamberlin has a much more famous descendant (some might say ripoff), the Mellotron. Here’s a little branding 101: don’t name your invention after yourself, unless you have a cool name like Robert Moog. Pick something retrofuture and groovy. The Mellotron sounds like something from Sleeper that you use between the Orb and the Orgasmatron. The intro of the Beatles’  “Strawberry Fields Forever” is Paul McCartney playing sampled flutes on a Mellotron.

Analog tape isn’t a great sample medium. The mechanisms are delicate and bulky. The tape decays over time. The little motors have to be running at exactly the right speed for the notes to play back in tune. Sampling keyboards didn’t really take off until the invention of inexpensive digital audio. Now that computers can play back audio recordings and perform all kinds of strange mathematical operations on them in real time, anything with a processor and a sound card can act as a sampler. Even high-end cell phones can perform the same functions as Ferris Bueller’s E-mu.

Some sampled instruments work better than others. A MIDI interface can only capture certain aspects of your performance: which note you played, how loud you played it, how long you held it. You can add some other performance data with the sustain pedal, with the pitch or mod wheels, and maybe with a few other parameters. That’s not nearly enough data dimensionality to convey all the infinitesimal nuances of the way a violin bow or guitar pick grips and releases a string. Stringed instruments sound extremely fake when played on a sampling keyboard. The fakeness has its own charms, but that’s a whole different instrument unto itself. Piano works well as a MIDI instrument since it practically was one to begin with. Any keyboard instrument translates well to MIDI. Massed orchestral instruments work better than solo ones. Horn samples can work okay if you don’t mind monotonous phrasing. Again, sometimes the robotic sound has its own quality. I mostly prefer more purely electronic sounds like abstract synths and samples of other songs.

One of my most entertaining experiments with sampling was called the Sikoratron. It’s a Reason patch I made using samples of Catherine Sikora, who I played with in a jazz group. To build my sample library, I recorded every member of the horn section doing solo improvisations. Catherine recorded these long, angular Coltrane-esque sax lines. By mapping different phrases to different regions of the keyboard, I could play my own far-out Catherine solos. The results were unpredictable, since the tonality of the phrases didn’t necessarily match the key that triggered them. The Sikoratron gave the best results when my non-keyboard playing friends explored it intuitively with their index fingers.

The full surrealism of MIDI is only just revealing itself. You can map sampled sounds to just about any physical action. Jerry Garcia used a MIDI guitar to play synthesized flute and such with the Grateful Dead. MIDI guitar such a cool idea in theory, since the guitar is already an amazing analog synth controller. Unfortunately, you can’t just slap a MIDI pickup unto an electric guitar, because it won’t track as accurately as you would want. You need to get an expensive special guitar made of a futuristic carbon composite. Fine if you’re Jerry Garcia, lame if you’re a normal person.

When I play electronic music live, I do my sample triggering with a video game controller. It’s more limited than a full MIDI keyboard, but for my stuff that’s a virtue. I see the future of MIDI belonging to game controllers. Check out this Synthtopia post on the world’s strangest MIDI controllers. Behold the Drumpants:

Other videos show people controlling synths and samples using pennies, a laser, a robotic exoskeleton, a sheet of paper, a driver’s license, hamsters and other odd things. Music looks like it’s going to continue to be fun in the future.

The color-coding system started as a simple information-management technique, but it ended up improving my ears. Spending so much time looking at these colorfully abstracted representations of so many songs, I couldn’t help but notice some patterns. I’ve done enough tracks now that I can lay something out in the sequencer and know that it’ll basically work without having to listen to it first. Classical and jazz musicians get to the point where by glancing over a score, they can hear it quite clearly in the mind’s ear. The Reason sequencer has a much shorter path into the brain’s deep sense-data processing centers because it’s dynamic, animated, and responsive to my thoughts in real time.

So here are three representative tunes. The rows are instruments, mostly sample players along with the odd drum machine or synth. The columns are groups of eight bars, sixty-four beats according to the dance music convention of a bar comprising eight eighth notes. You can see that every phrase in these tunes is two, four, eight or sixteen bars long. This is no accident. Powers of two sound good. Each colored brick is a phrase worth of sequencer data. My system is to color intros and outtros pale yellow, the verses blue, choruses green, instrumentals and breakdowns orange, and bridges purple. The colors are chosen soley on the basis of what looks good together on the screen.

The Sign – Revival Revival vs Ace Of Base vs Super Mario Bros vs Scientist

Even though this track is a freakshow sonically and memetically, its underlying structure is total pop boilerplate. Every phrase is eight bars long. The intro is mostly identical to the verses, each of which is followed by the chorus. The breakdown is modeled on the verse, but twice as long, and is followed by a triple chorus to end the song. The outtro is the last chorus spaced out and with no drums, plus a little tag on the very end.

Tomorrow Never Knows – Revival Revival vs the Beatles vs M.I.A. vs Missy Elliot

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

Since this is a fake Ravi Shankar tune, it has a more open-ended, less narrative structure. The single-chord jam fits electronic music like a glove, and fake Middle Eastern and Asian music usually translates better to computers than Western linear tunes with definite beginnings, middles and ends. Tomorrow Never Knows is a single mixolydian scale to infinity, verses interspersed with open-ended passages of swirling modal chaos. I have a few different versions of the basic loop with different densities, but functionally they’re all interchangeable. The colors are more general landmarks for me.

Love Her Madly – Revival Revival vs the Doors vs James Brown

We like this tune so much that we extend it like crazy in performances. The recording only goes to the bridge once, but live we do a breakdown and then go back into the bridge, sometimes a few times. The outtro is when I rap.

MIDI sequencers like Reason have done for music notation and composition what word processing and the internet did for the written word. Especially intriguing is the way you can move the loop markers around during playback. My one sadness with Reason’s sequencer is that while there are many operations you can perform during playback and live recording, you can’t copy and paste in the sequencer window without stopping first. Maybe there’s some unavoidable software constraint here, or maybe it’s just lazy coding, I’ll give the Reason guys the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. I’m finding so much inspiration in their software, it feels ungrateful to criticize.

Reblogged on Hysysk’s Delicious