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

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

My preferred method the past few years is to record some improvisation over a beat, and then edit the high points together in the computer. I also like to take samples, slice them and see how far I can get rearranging and pitch-shifting them. With vocals, I like to sing wordlessly or scat nonsense syllables, and then fit lyrics to them later. I learned a lot of these methods from working with hip-hop and electronic dance-pop artists and they’ve done a lot to freshen up my writing, make me take chances, and not be too precious about my ideas. When I’m doing work for hire, of course, I have to follow to the client’s process, and that can be a drag, but I try to adapt to whatever the method is.

If you’re immersed deeply in music, ideas will just pop out of your head continually. He’s wise to carry a recording device with him at all times. Paul McCartney famously kept a tape recorder, notebook and guitar or piano in every room of the house. “Yesterday” came to him more or less fully formed in a dream, and when he woke up, he just rolled over and recorded it before it vanished. These sorts of bolts of inspiration don’t just come out of nowhere. You need to feed your brain a lot of raw material. Listening isn’t enough. You need to memorize and perform other people’s material, and play around with it. Try extending or dropping sections, try combining parts of different songs together, try altering a chord here or there. Your brain will take in all these chunks of music, digest them and recombine them while you go about your day (and apparently also while you sleep.) When something hits, you need to be ready for it.

What is the creative process like when writing a song?

It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

mp3 download, ipod format download

There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

It’s hard for us now to imagine a time when recorded sound was a wondrous technological novelty.

Those gathered around the phonograph were experiencing music in ways unimaginable not so many years before. They were hearing performers they could not see and music they could not normally bring into their homes. They could listen to the same pieces over and again without change. And they ultimately decided what they were to hear, and when, where, and with whom.

Before the phonograph, music was an intrinsically social activity. The only way to hear it was to be in the physical presence of the performers, necessarily placing the experience into a strong social context. Recordings suddenly divorced the sounds from their original context. Now that recordings flit effortlessly to and fro on the web, the original context of their making is even further removed, and often not even recoverable. Katz gives the usual Walter Benjamin quote about how reproduction of art destroys its aura.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art,” [Benjamin] maintained, “is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Reproductions, therefore, lack what Benjamin called the “aura” of the artwork. From Benjamin’s standpoint this absence is to be lamented. He speaks of the withering of the aura, the depreciation of the artwork, the loss of authenticity, and the shattering of tradition. Benjamin, however, missed half of the equation. True, mass-reproduced art does lack temporal and physical uniqueness, yet reproductions, no longer bound to the circumstances of their creation, may encourage new experiences and generate new traditions, wherever they happen to be… [W]hile recorded music is often decoupled from its origins in space and time, this “loss” begets a contextual promiscuity that allows music to accrue new, rich, and unexpected meanings.

All this freedom can be disorienting. It’s particularly weird to not be able to see the performers’ faces and bodies. Katz ascribes the popularity of music videos to our discomfort with the lack of visual emotional cues in recordings. The problem is that the videos have so little to do with actual music making that they usually contribute to the alienation. The found videos in Auto-tune The News have an authenticity to them that traditional music videos don’t. The Auto-tune on Antoine Dodson’s voice might be fake, but the anger in his face is very real.

When musicians record, their invisibility to listeners removes an important channel of communication, for performers express themselves not only through the sound of their voices or instruments but with their faces and bodies. In concert, these gestures color the audience’s understanding of the music. As Igor Stravinsky rightly explained, “The sight of the gestures and movements of the various parts of the body producing the music is fundamentally necessary if it is to be grasped in all its fullness.” The violinist Itzhak Perlman, for example, is effective in concert in part because his face registers and reinforces every expressive nuance in the music. Perlman himself once remarked that “people only half listen to you when you play—the other half is watching.”

Recording artists have also reacted to the fact that they cannot see their audiences. For many, the task of performing to unseen listeners, with recording equipment as their proxy, can be both daunting and depressing. In her memoirs, French soprano Régine Crespin registered her dismay at the artificiality of performing in the studio:

“Fear of an audience is healthy; it stimulates you. The people are there in front of you. With them there can be mutual lovefests. But how can you fall in love with a microphone? First of all, a microphone is ugly. It’s a cold, steel, impersonal thing, suspended above your head or resting on a pole just in front of your nose. And it defies you, like HAL the computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, although at least he talked. No, the microphone waits, unpitying, insensitive and ultrasensitive at the same time, and when it speaks, it’s to repeat everything you’ve said word for word. The beast.”

Recordings have created the possibility that a musical experience can be exactly repeated.

Live performances are unique, while recordings are repeatable… [A]ny orchestra can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony many times; each performance, however, will necessarily be different.

For listeners, repetition raises expectations. This is true in live performance; once we’ve heard Beethoven’s Fifth in concert, we assume it will start with the same famous four notes the next time we hear it. But with recordings, we can also come to expect features that are unique to a particular performance—that a certain note will be out of tune, say. With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding them as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.

The repeatability of recorded sound has affected listeners’ expectations on a much broader scope as well. When the phonograph was invented, the goal for any recording was to simulate a live performance, to approach reality as closely as possible. Over the decades, expectations have changed. For many—perhaps most—listeners, music is now primarily a technologically mediated experience. Concerts must therefore live up to recordings. Given that live music had for millennia been the only type of music, it is amazing to see how quickly it has been supplanted as model and ideal.

I’ve played in a lot of bands, and one of the biggest obstacles they all faced was that most of the time, people would prefer to hear recordings than to hear us play. I’ve backed some very good jazz singers, but why would you want to listen to them when you could hear Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald? Live music is an invaluable art experience but if you just want to dance or be entertained, DJs beat bands nine times out of ten.

A lot of musicians I know would read the previous paragraph and bitterly remark on the harm that recording has done to musical culture. Maybe they’re right, but recordings have given us a lot too. I think that the experience of repeat listening to recordings has made Western listeners more accepting of repetition as a feature of the music itself. Westerners have historically resisted the loop-based, chant-oriented forms in other world cultures. But American popular music has been getting more and more loop-based, especially in my lifetime. Tape loops and samplers have both created the tools to make loop-based recordings, and fueled the demand for them.

Recording has changed music education radically, putting improvisation and other non-notated forms on an equal scholarly footings with written scores.

With recordings, performers can study, emulate, or imitate performances in a way never before possible. In the early days of recording, this possibility was trumpeted as a gift to all musicians, who could learn from the world’s great masters by studying their discs. For performers of popular music, recordings have been especially valuable learning aids. The available scores do not always represent performances adequately, and they cannot easily indicate the timbres and sonic effects that musicians seek to develop.

Audio editing tools also make it possible to build recordings without an actual “performance” ever taking place.

Listen to most early-twentieth-century recordings and you will hear a performance in the traditional sense. That is, you are hearing a single and complete take, in which the beginning, middle, and end of the piece were recorded in that order on the same day, in the same place, and by the same performer or group. This was hardly out of a desire for authenticity; it was a product of necessity. However, since the introduction of magnetic tape (in the late 1940s) and digital recording (in the late 1970s), it has been possible to offer the illusion of a traditional performance as well as to create “performances” that could never have existed. With the ability to manipulate sound through such technology, musicians have been able to transcend time, space, and human limitations, and in the process have created wholly new sounds, works, genres, and performance traditions.

One of the most basic manipulations is splicing, in which passages recorded at different times are joined together. The Beatles’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) provides a famous example. The Beatles did over two dozen takes of the song, none of which completely satisfied John Lennon. But he did like the first half of Take 7 and the second half of Take 26. So he asked George Martin, their producer, to put the two together. Unfortunately, they were in different keys and tempos. The two takes, however, were related in such a way that when one was sped up and the other slowed down so that the tempos matched, the pitches also matched. Thus the two takes could be joined, the splice occurring at about 0:59 on the word going in “Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.” Although the splice is nearly undetectable, the slightly altered speed of Lennon’s voice helps give the song its distinctively dreamlike quality.

You can build recordings entirely from samples, synthesized and sequenced sounds and jamming. It’s common in pop, dance music and hip-hop to go into the studio with no prepared material at all, and come out with finished songs. Songwriting, improvising and recording have collapsed into a single act.

The job of assembling an electronically-oriented recording is a new form of musicianship unto itself.

It is important to realize that sound is manipulated in the studio not (or not typically) by performers, but by a variety of sound engineers and producers, sometimes referred to collectively as recordists. Recordists fall outside (or perhaps in between) the traditional triad of composer, performer, and listener. They might be thought of as sound shapers, artists in their own right who collaborate with performers and composers.

[T]he very possibility of manipulating sound after its creation—from splicing to digital pitch correction—forces us to reformulate our ideas about composition, performance, and the relationship between the two.

[R]ecording does more than influence the activities of composers, performers, and listeners. It affects the relationship among these actors and in fact challenges the stability, even the validity, of the triad. It is no longer necessary for listeners and performers, or for performers and composers, to work together in order to create music. Yet at the same time, listeners and composers have discovered a more intimate relationship, one that can bypass the mediation of performers, while performers can work in solitude, without the need to stand before listeners. Performances and works are no longer clearly distinct, for recordings can take on the function and meaning of both. Just as recordings can be heard as spontaneous interpretive acts, their repetition can transform them into compositions, works that can be analyzed, historicized, canonized, politicized, and problematized. Nor are production and reproduction so easily separated when preexisting sounds can be manipulated in real time.

A lot to think about. But not everything in the book is so serious. From the introduction:

Several years ago a friend asked me to explain the subject of this book, then in its early stages of development. Opting for a dramatic approach, I pulled a CD at random from a nearby shelf and brandished it in front of me. “This,” I declared, “has changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music.” My friend squinted at the CD, gave me a quizzical look, and asked, “That did?” “Yes!” I answered with gusto. Seeming unconvinced, he clarified his question. “Van Halen changed the way we listen to, perform, and compose music?”

Yes, yes they did.

The track isn’t so much a song as it is an early mashup. Just about everything in it is a sample or quote. Here are the sources:

• The eighties version of the Doctor Who theme music
• “Rock and Roll (Part Two)” and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am)” by Gary Glitter
• “Blockbuster!” by Sweet
• “Let’s Get Together Tonite” by Steve Walsh

Drummond and Cauty formed the KLF with the specific intent to thumb their nose at the concepts of ownership and copyright. Nevertheless, by the time of “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” they had attained enough commercial success that that they were able to license all of their samples and quotes. In spite of their not owning much of the publishing rights to their song, Drummond and Cauty ended up making over a million pounds from it. Not bad for a few days’ work. With a modern laptop and Pro Tools the track probably would have taken them twenty minutes.

“Doctorin’ The Tardis” was hot for a very brief instant in the UK, and an even briefer one here in America. I heard it on the radio probably once, after which I went around in an agony of frustration at never being able to track it down and hear it again. What I wouldn’t have given in the eighth grade for the internet. At the time, Doctor Who was a very fringe, very nerdy taste. Even the Trekkies looked down on Doctor Who fans.

Much as I love their one hit and their overall concept, I can’t say I’m too wild about the rest of the KLF’s music that I’ve heard. The only other track of theirs that really does it for me is another crazy mashup, “Whitney Joins The JAMS,” which combines “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “The Theme From Shaft” and the Mission: Impossible theme.

Also, Jimmy Cauty later went on to form The Orb, whose music I love as music and not just conceptually.

After their trip to the top of the charts, the KLF went on to write “The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.” It’s an excellent guide to the production of electronic music generally. I was tempted to just paste the whole thing in, but that would have been ridiculous, so here are some choice quotes, along with my responses.

The emotional appetite that chart pop satisfies is constant. The hunger is forever. What does change is the technology this is always on the march. At some point in the future science will develop a commodity that will satisfy this emotional need in a more efficient way.

Hopefully something more participatory, interactive and gamelike?

To make pop music, you don’t need a band. You need a programmer.

Just after 1 pm Tuesday telephone the studio that you have booked and tell them you are going to need someone who can programme, ideally a programmer who can play the keyboards. Every studio can get one for you. This programmer is going to be the person who will provide, sample, originate, compute, even play all the music you will need on your record.

In hip-hop terms, this person is known as the beatmaker. The word producer is also sometimes loosely used for programmers/beatmakers.

The process of sequencing a pop or dance track is more like methodically cooking a meal or building a building than a wild Dionysian outburst.

It is going to be a construction job, fitting bits together. You will have to find the Frankenstein in you to make it work. Your magpie instincts must come to the fore. If you think this just sounds like a recipe for some horrific monster, be reassured by us, all music can only be the sum or part total of what has gone before. Every Number One song ever written is only made up from bits from other songs. There is no lost chord. No changes untried. No extra notes to the scale or hidden beats to the bar. There is no point in searching for originality. In the past, most writers of songs spent months in their lonely rooms strumming their guitars or bands in rehearsals have ground their way through endless riffs before arriving at the song that takes them to the very top. Of course, most of them would be mortally upset to be told that all they were doing was leaving it to chance before they stumbled across the tried and tested. They have to believe it is through this sojourn they arrive at the grail; the great and original song that the world will be unable to resist.

So why don’t all songs sound the same? Why are some artists great, write dozens of classics that move you to tears, say it like it’s never been said before, make you laugh, dance, blow your mind, fall in love, take to the streets and riot? Well, it’s because although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before their own soul shines through; their personality demands attention. This doesn’t just come via the great vocalist or virtuoso instrumentalist. The Techno sound of Detroit, the most totally linear programmed music ever, lacking any human musicianship in its execution reeks of sweat, sex and desire. The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes – a million years of pain and lust.

Creators of music who desperately search for originality usually end up with music that has none because no room for their spirit has been left to get through. The complete history of the blues is based on one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s greatest music.

Can I get an amen!

Inexperienced songwriters start with lyrics, treating the rest of the song as decoration. This is like building a house and starting with the wallpaper. Wiser songwriters start with a melody or chord progression, and the wisest ones start with the groove, the foundation of any musical structure:

Before we go any further we had better define “groove”. It is basically the drum and bass patterns and all the other musical sounds on the record that are neither hummable or singalongable to. Groove is the underlying sex element of the record and we are afraid for U.K. Number Ones this can never be left too rabidly raw on the 7″ format. It upsets our subliminal national moral code. We can cope with smut but not grind.

America is a little looser in this regard, but raw beats still make many of my fellow white people anxious.

In the same way that our sexual fantasies change and develop, sometimes double back over a period of months, so do our dance floor tastes in groove. It is always on the move, searching for the ultimate turn on and when you are almost there it’s off again and you’re left looking for a new direction.

Black American records have always been the most reliable source of dance groove. These records down through the years have inevitably laid so much emphasis on the altar of groove and so very little into fulfilling the other Golden Rules that they very rarely break through into the U.K. Top Ten, let alone making the Number One spot. A by-product of this situation is that gangsters of the groove from Bo Diddley on down believe they have been ripped off, not only by the business but by all the artists that have followed on from them. This is because the copyright laws that have grown over the past one hundred years have all been developed by whites of European descent and these laws state that fifty per cent of the copyright of any song should be for the lyrics, the other fifty per cent for the top line (sung) melody; groove doesn’t even get a look in. If the copyright laws had been in the hands of blacks of African descent, at least eighty per cent would have gone to the creators of the groove, the remainder split between the lyrics and the melody. If perchance you are reading this and you are both black and a lawyer, make a name for yourself. Right the wrongs.

The best place to find the groove that 7″ single buyers will want to be tapping their toes to in three months time is to get down to the hippest club in your part of the country that is playing import American black dance records. The unknown track the DJ plays that gets both the biggest response on the floor and has you joining the throng will have the groove you are looking for…

If there is neither a suitable club or specialist dance shop in your part of the country don’t throw in the towel as this is where the dance music compilations we have instructed you to buy on Monday morning come in. Stick them on the record player, turn it up loud and get lost in the groove, leave your mind on the bookshelf where it belongs, feel yourself if need be but keep going until you “feel the force” and you are “lost in music”, when the only answer to the question “can you feel it” is “yes”.

Pure dance music, if it has any lyrical content at all, will only deal in the emotions experienced within the four walls of a club late at night; basically desire and, more importantly, that area which is beyond desire at the very centre of the Human Psyche. Everything else is meaningless. Any creator of pure dance music that is attempting to communicate any other subject should be treated with deep suspicion. With a danger of getting too carried away on our own pretensions we state that it is through dance music and dancing we are able to get momentarily back to the Garden. Of course, in the clear light of day this is all very silly.

Not so silly, to my mind.

After the groove, the next key structural element is song structure. Like groove, it acts on your unconscious powerfully.

As we have already mentioned, the Golden Rule for a classic Number One single is intro, verse one, chorus one, verse two, chorus two, breakdown section, double chorus, outro.

Each of these sections will be made up of bars in groupings of multiples of four. So you might have an intro containing four bars, a verse sixteen bars and a chorus eight bars. At times the first verses can be double length verses, or the second chorus a double length. These sort of decisions are not going to have to be finally made until you reach the mixing stage of the record, when the engineer will have to start editing the whole track to make it work in the most concise and exciting way possible within three minutes and thirty seconds.

This last part is no longer strictly true. Pro Tools grid mode and MIDI editors make song-structural editing as easy as editing text in a word processor. You can work out structure in the midst of the recording/songwriting itself.

Hopefully, at sometime over the remaining days of the week, you will have been able to get out to a club and found the groove you need, been able to buy it on vinyl and get it home. It has to be the 12″ version as this will have whole great tracts of raw groove where each of the component parts of the groove are broken down and left exposed for your engineer and programmer to study and imitate when it comes to recording your record.

Again, the computer makes this easier. You can effortlessy loop a bar or two of any recording. Dance mixes do make it easier to find loop-worthy grooves, though.

The next thing you have got to have is a chorus. The chorus is the bit in the song that you can’t help but sing along with. It is the most important element in a hit single because it is the part that most people carry around with them in their head, when there is no radio to be heard, no video on TV, and they are far from the dance floor. It’s the part that nags you while day dreaming in the classroom or at work or as you walk down the street to sign on. It’s the part that finally convinces the punters to make that trip down to the record shop and buy it.

In other words, the chorus contains the meme, the earworm, the mind virus. Your conscious mind is not your friend when it comes time to grow a new meme. You need to reach behind it, into the more evolutionarily ancient and intuitive brain systems.

So, slip on the 12″ or your dance compilation and sing along with the breakdown sections; any old words will do, just whatever comes out of your mouth. If you have difficulty in forming a tune in your head or you feel a bit inhibited, flick through your copy of the Guinness Book of Hits and pick any Top Five record that takes your fancy and see if you can sing the chorus of it along to the track.

Take for example:

“That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha That’s the way a-ha, a-ha I like it a-ha, a-ha”

by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. That one usually works and should get you going in the right direction but there are hundreds to choose from.

The lyrics for the chorus must never deal with anything but the most basic of human emotions. This is not us trying to be cynical in a clever sort of way when we say “stick to the cliches”. The cliches are the cliches because they deal with the emotional topics we all feel. No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever or deal in strange and new ideas. In fact, the lyrics can be quite meaningless in a literal sense but still have a great emotional pull. An obvious example of this was the chorus of our own record:

“Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, in the Tardis Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who”

Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap. A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The Top for more than one week.

Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7″ single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over – the Number One position was guaranteed:

“I’m never going to give you up”

It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

“I’m never gonna let you down I’m never going to fool around or upset you”

GENIUS.

Michael Jackson may be the biggest singing star in the world. Sold more L.P.s than any other artist at any time in the history of pop but he has had very few U.K. Number Ones. If he would like to make amends on this front he should start co-writing with the SAW team or read this manual. He has quite a bit to learn about the opening line of a chorus.

Did these guys just compare Michael Jackson unfavorably to Rick Astley? Did I really just get rickrolled in a book written in 1988? That takes chutzpah.

We are afraid you can’t just go down to the local supermarket and listen to the check-out girls’ talk and hope you can pick up the right line before Waterman gets to it. The line has to come to you and when it does you’ve got to grab it. Mindlessly singing along to the 12″ groove track you have is the best way.

The routine practice now is to record this mindless improvisation into the computer. If something valuable tumbles out, you can easily grab it, copy and paste it and build the song around it.

You must be worrying by now how you, or if not you, who on earth is going to front this record! If you already think you are a great singer and a well happening front person, then we have a problem. It means you will have the sort of ego that will render it totally impossible for you to be objective about everything else that has got to be done. Singers have historically made the worst producers of their own work. The reason for this is simply that singers have to become so emotionally involved in their performance it cancels out any sort of over view. At the very least they need a musical partner that can give them some direction. If a singer was able to have this calculated view of their own work the end product would undoubtedly come over as cold and empty.

This is profoundly true. Singers like to mix vocals way out in front, with the instrumental track as a distant accompaniment. This sounds super corny and dated. Cool music puts the beat up front.

The club D.J. (like his forerunner the dance band leader of the thirties, forties and fifties) realises that the most important thing is keeping the dance floor full and the thing that keeps the dancers dancing now (as it was then) is the music with its underpinning groove factor. Singing throughout has always just provided a distraction from the main event – what is happening on the dance floor and not on the stage.

Music that’s meant to be listened to alone can be lyrics-oriented and built around a vocal sound. But social music needs to center on the beat.

For the majority of people the sound of the vocals and the words that are being sung throughout the verses just merge into the over all sound of the track. The words that are being sung could be any old gibberish, only the words to the chorus have any real importance. Of course there are the exceptions when the classic narrative song breaks through and storms the Number One slot These can never be planned and I’m sure the performers of these freak hits are as surprised as anybody when it happens. So unless you want to risk everything on some bizarre tale you have to tell, stick with us.

Michael Jackson’s lyrics are usually totally incomprehensible, which is no obstacle to their enjoyment. It’s nice to have a blank slate to project your own imagination of the song onto.

So now you can tackle the construction of the verse without worrying about singers.

Using the basic groove you have decided upon you are now going to have to choose a bass line that will work as the basis for the whole song, or at least the verse sections. We take it there is no point in us trying to describe what the bass line is in any great detail, but it’s the bit in the record that throbs and keeps the flow going. In days gone by it was provided by the bass guitar player, now it is all played by the programmed keyboards. Even if you want it to sound like a real bass guitar, a sampled sound of a bass guitar will be used, then programmed. It’s easier than getting some thumb-slapping dick head in.

The groove might already have a killer bass line in there, making the whole thing happen and to remove it and exchange it for another might destroy what you have already got. There are plenty of monster bass lines out there to try. You will know them, they are the ones that you can almost hum. The great thing about bass lines is that they are in public domain. Nobody, even if they do recognise it, will seriously accuse you of ripping somebody else’s bass line off.

Michael Jackson, who we cited earlier on for not being that adept at coming up with the killer Number One hit choruses, CAN come up with the bass lines. “Billie Jean” was the turning point in Jackson’s career. That song, on his own admission, took him into the mega stratospheres where his myth now reigns. The fact is, “Billie Jean” would be nothing without that lynx-on-the-prowl bass line; but he wasn’t the first to use it. It had been featured in numerous dance tracks by various artists before him. Jackson and Quincy must have been hanging out around the pool table in their air conditioned dimmed light atmosphere, L.A. studio one evening wondering: “What next?” when one of them came up with the idea of using the old lynx- on-the-prowl standby. Without making that decision back in 1981 there would have been no Pepsi Cola sponsored jamboree in 1988.

We are not trying to deny any of the very real talent that Jackson has, just trying to emphasise the possible importance of the killer bass line.

Serious groove merchants hate it when a song has a dynamite bass line for the verse and then when the chorus comes the chords change, dragging the bass away from its “bad self” into having to follow those limp wristed chords. For them the whole movement of the song is destroyed for the sake of some nursery rhyme element they would rather see dumped.

Somehow these two important elements are going to have to be made to work together without the power of the chorus or the propulsion of verse bass riff being destroyed. Ideally, when a song hits its chorus it should feel it’s the natural thing to happen, a release from the tension of the verse. By the end of the chorus you must feel like nothing is desired more than to slide back down into the vice-like grip of the bass line.

Some groove merchants have a talent for getting it all their own way by coming up with a bass riff that never shifts from the beginning of the song until the end: intro, choruses, verses, breakdowns, outro all fitting around the same bass riff. For a song to sound like this and work away from the confines of the dance floor, it is going to have to be a real mutha of a riff. There must be some pretty insistent action going on on top of it to keep the casual radio listener interested. Even on “Billie Jean” they moved off the bass riff for the chorus.

Actually, the prechorus. But point taken.

Drummond and Cauty have a ton of other good songwriting advice. Like, don’t use a bridge, use a breakdown section instead. This breakdown section should be just the rhythm tracks with some ambiance on top, not a solo, because:

Nowadays, solos either get in the way or have to be fabulously stunning at the same time as being able to fit in with the studio sculpting that is going on around it. Having some guitarist give you his interpretation of what a really good guitar solo should sound like is totally out of the question. Guitar solos only work in modern pop records when they are over the top things full of hideous histrionics and lacking in any emotional depth whatsoever. This type of guitar solo is one of the very few things that heavy metal has given back to Top Ten chart music. Yet again, Jackson’s name comes in here. It all started when he used Eddie Van Halen on the “Thriller” L.P. So unless you have a mate that can play just like Eddie – forget it.

The only other reason for having a meaningless solo on your track is to give the record some instant profile upon the record’s release by making it known in the media that it features a boring but sainted muso, thus giving it some fake cred. The tried and tested guest soloists of the late eighties are: Miles Davis on trumpet, Courtney Pine on saxophone and Stevie Wonder on harmonica. Untried possibilities that might create some interest would be Jimmy Page or Junior Walker. But really we would recommend you don’t bother – unless you can get Jimi Hendrix to do it.

Finally, here’s a perfect description of how the production process feels at its best:

From now on in you will begin to feel the inevitable pull of the unseen life force of the record you have allowed to be created. It will be as if you are in a sailing boat and suddenly from nowhere a wisp of wind fills the sails. Your job is to hold onto the rudder and at all times never lose sight of the harbour lights. Let the crew bail out the water. Let the crew trim the sails. Let the crew man the galley. Remember, if you ever leave go of the rudder to help the crew all hands may be lost – along with any chance of ever hearing your record being played at five minutes to seven on Radio One on a Sunday evening.

Very zen. Very true.

Gould liked the studio better than the concert hall because he felt that recordings created more opportunities for a two-way conversation between performer and listener. From the book Wondrous Strange by Kevin Bazzana:

He extended his belief in creative freedom to its logical limit, advocating the direct participation of the listener in the creative process, through the intercession of technology. He believed that the modern listener had the same right to tinker with the recording artist’s work as the performer had to tinker with the composer’s. “Dial twiddling is in its limited way an interpretive act,” he noted, and the hi-fi listener was by nature a creative force: even to adjust volume, tone and balance on a crude home stereo of the 1960s was to impose oneself creatively onto the work. “I’m all for the kit concept,” he said in 1968. “I’d love to issue a series of variant performances and let the listener choose what they themselves most like. Let them assemble their own performance. Give them all the component parts, all the component splices, rendered at different tempi with different dynamic inflections, and let them put something together that they really enjoy — make them participant to that degree.” [...] But even without the “kits” he envisioned, recording, Gould said, “compels the performer to relinquish some control in favor of the listener, a state of affairs, by the way, which I find to be both encouraging and charming, not to mention aesthetically appropriate and morally right.”

I’m totally on board with this idea. Classical music concerts are soul-deadening, even when the music is exciting. You have to sit silently and motionlessly. The performers’ faces rarely register emotion, much less their bodies. You can’t even clap between movements. Alex Ross tentatively proposes a relaxation of rigid concert etiquette to make the experience less tedious. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the basic fact of the forbidding cliff between performer and audience. I’m not suggesting that classical concerts need mosh pits, but it flies in the face of our basic humanity to ask us to not participate in music bodily.

Glenn Gould was prescient in his insistence that music is all about participation, not spectating. There’s a direct line from Gould’s kit recording concept and musicians who release remix-friendly a capellas, instrumentals and separated stems. I’ll bet Gould would have been delighted to play around with Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” stems. I’m hoping he would have approved of my mashup, too:

Gould Lockdown

Me vs Glenn Gould vs Kanye West

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I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.

Revival Revival vs Janet Jackson

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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.