Baby, I Love You

I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This week I soothed myself by studying “Baby, I Love You” from her 1967 album Aretha Arrives.

The song is by Ronnie Shannon, who also wrote “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”. The guitar is by Jimmy Johnson or Joe South, or possibly both of them. Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Spooner Oldham plays electric piano. The horn section includes Charles Chalmers and King Curtis on tenor saxophone, Tony Studd on bass trombone, and Melvin Lastie on trumpet. The backing vocals are by Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin, along with Aretha herself overdubbed on the chorus.

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For No One

The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.”

Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. (He also played in the orchestra on “A Day In The Life.”) John and George were not involved.

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What is the difference between analog and digital recording?

All microphones are analog. They convert pressure waves in the air into electricity. Pressure waves in the air vibrate a little piece of metal, and that generates a fluctuating electrical current. Different kinds of mics have different specific ways of doing this. In dynamic mics, the air vibrates a magnet. This magnet is wrapped in wire, and its motion produces a current in the wire. In condenser mics, the air vibrates a metal plate that’s part of a capacitor with an electrical current already flowing through it. As the plate moves, it blocks or admits more of the current, making the current fluctuate. There are other kinds of mics with other physical setups, but they all do the same thing: they send out an electrical current whose fluctuations match (are an analog for) the fluctuations of air pressure.

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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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Waiting For Benny

The Genius of the Electric Guitar is an aptly-named compilation of studio recordings that Charlie Christian made with Benny Goodman between 1939 and 1941. The album includes a couple of informal studio jams recorded while Goodman’s band was waiting for their leader to show up. Both jams have self-explanatory titles: “Blues in B” and “Waiting For Benny.” The latter one is where the real magic happens.

After a minute and a half of jamming in the key of A, Charlie Christian suddenly cues the band into a tune. Its key is ambiguous at first, but once the piano comes in, it quickly reveals itself to be F. I had always known this tune simply as “Waiting For Benny,” as do many other jazz fans. However, Benny Goodman later recorded it under the title “A Smo-o-o-oth One.” Apparently this recording was made at the same session as “Waiting For Benny”, though the documentation is unclear. Continue reading

Kind Hearted Woman Blues

So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice.

Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans have filled the vacuum with endless mythologizing. I find it distasteful to read about him selling his soul to the devil to get good at guitar. It’s patronizing. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he got so good by just practicing a lot? Rather than engaging with all of that nonsense, I would prefer to focus on his music. Here’s the first song Robert Johnson ever recorded.

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Eleanor Rigby

In both music theory and music tech classes, I ask the students to pick songs and analyze their structure. This semester, one student chose “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. She had a hard time with it–understandably! It’s not a complicated song, but it is an unconventional one. In this post, I’ll talk through the tune’s many points of structural, music-theoretic and sonic interest.

Fun fact: “Eleanor Rigby” was issued as the B-side to the “Yellow Submarine” single in 1966. That’s a pretty brutal come-down in mood.

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Clair de Lune

I struggle with the rhythms of rubato-heavy classical pieces, and no one loves rubato more than the Impressionists. When I started listening in earnest to recordings of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” I couldn’t even guess the time signature, much less place notes in the bar. This piece is therefore an excellent use case for aural learning through remixing. First I tried putting the MIDI in Ableton over some beats. Then I thought it would sound better to use human performances and cooler beats.

This was my toughest remix challenge yet. Adapting breakbeats to triple meter is one thing; adapting them to 9/8 time is another. I did finally discover that “The Crunge” by Led Zeppelin is also in 9/8, and after some minor editing, the opening drum break fit in just fine. I also used jazz drumming sampled from McCoy Tyner and Adam Makowicz. I used aggressive low-pass filtering to keep the beats from overwhelming the delicate piano, and I beefed up the piano part via compression as well.

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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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