Friday, September 18, 2009
My favorite Michael Jackson song is “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” This post is part of what’s turning into a series on it. The previous post is about the song as fan art, and some of the fan art that it’s inspired, from bootleg Youtube videos to licensed remixes. This one is about who owns the [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Music, Music Business, Sampling
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Also tagged bmg, bruce swedian, copyright, manu dibango, memes, michael jackson, ownership, quincy jones, remixes, rights, rihanna, Sampling, sony, soul makossa, thriller
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See a followup post about female remixes of “A Milli” Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged america, anxiety, autotune, class, cole porter, comedy, computers, drum machines, Evolution, hip-hop, Improvisation, irony, kanye west, lil wayne, memes, michael jackson, minimalism, natalie portman, natural selection, recursion, remixes, Sampling, snl, Social Media, t-pain, white people
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
I revere Björk above most other musicians. She knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrumental textures. Not everybody loves Björk as much as I do; her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by [...]
Filed in Composition, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
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Also tagged audio editing, bjork, depression, electronica, hipster, iceland, interface, lord of the rings, missy elliot, pro tools, remixes, Sampling, sequencing, timbaland, tolkien
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Here’s one of my favorite bits of South Park.
Filed in Dance, Interfaces, Music, Music Teaching, Video Games
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Also tagged america, beatles, dance, electronica, gender, guitar hero, masculinity, remixes, rock, rock band, simulation, south park, Video Games, visualization
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“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads and Brian Eno is one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
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Also tagged attention, beatles, brian eno, david byrne, Improvisation, meditation, mixing, philosophy, recursion, reggae, remixes, sly and the family stone, talking heads, tape, tape editing, time
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One of the greatest weirdnesses of electronic music is the sampling keyboard. You press a key and any sound recording you want pops out, at whatever pitch. The recent passing of John Hughes made me think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Ferris samples his coughing and puking on an E-mu Emulator [...]
Filed in Hardware, Interfaces, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged audio, beatles, eighties, ferris bueller, grateful dead, jazz, john hughes, keybs, mellotron, midi, Music, reason, recursion, Sampling, synths, tape, yello
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Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Music, Recording, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged audio editing, beatles, composing, gnarls barkley, hip-hop, kind of blue, looping, michael jackson, miles davis, Music, pro tools, psychology, thriller
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My friend Leo told me that he always faces a conflict when shopping for jazz records. He wants to show love for working musicians by buying their newer recordings, but then, he could always just pick up another Miles Davis album and know it’s going to be ridiculously good. Probably my favorite Miles album out [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged audio editing, funk, Improvisation, jazz, miles davis, Music, Music Theory, recursion, remixes, seventies, sixties, tape editing
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The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is the perfect embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock. What makes John Bonham’s drums on this track so staggeringly heavy? Partially it’s his playing, and partially it’s the innovative production. Bonham’s performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse [...]
Filed in Music, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged bjork, blues, digging the crates, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, history, led zeppelin, Music, pitch shifting, pop, rock
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How do you get sound in and out of a computer? There are two steps. You have to turn the sound into electricity, and then you have to turn the electricity into numbers. Turning sound into electricity At the physical level, a sound is a rhythmic vibration of air molecules. Your ears can detect subtle [...]
Filed in Hardware, Math, Music
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Also tagged audio, audio editing, binary, electronica, imaginarynumbers, Math, Music, perception, pro tools, visualization
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