If you want to get your web page noticed but don’t want to spend a lot of money on text ads, your best bet is search engine optimization, or SEO. As of this writing, that mostly means understanding how Google ranks search hits, and adapting your web presence accordingly.
Historically search engine results were based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. The problem is that there are a lot of web pages out there with overlapping keywords. Another problem is that this system is easy to game by loading your pages with invisible text repeating the keywords over and over. Google attempts to rank its search results in the order of their usefulness. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to your page. If more people link to a web site, presumably it’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.
So the key to a higher Google rank is getting inbound links. The question is, how do you get people to link to you?
The most sampled recording in history is (probably) the Funky Drummer loop from James Brown’s song “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” Here I go deeper into how this sample can be reworked into new music. DJs call this practice chopping a sample. It’s much easier to chop samples with computers than with hardware samplers and turntables.
To take a sample, the first step is to extract it as a separate audio file. I like to use a program called Transcribe for this purpose. Once I have a sample, my preferred tools for remixing are Recycle, which slices a sample into individually-manipulable pieces, and Reason’s Dr Rex loop player, for reshuffling and resequencing the slices, changing the key, adding effects and doing further transformation.
Here’s the Funky Drummer loop as seen in Recycle. Click through to see it bigger.
Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the loop as it’s played repetitively.
Anna watched me Twitter over my shoulder for a while, and then announced: “I get it. It’s a video game where you compete for attention from strangers on the internet.” She’s completely correct. Having a web presence is a real-world immersive internet game where the scoreboard is your stats page or follower list. Like any good iPhone game, Twitter even has a built-in global leaderboard. Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.
This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me some non-hypothetical real-world benefits.
We were on our way to Grand Central, on the first leg of our trip north for Thanksgiving. A girl sitting near us on the 4 train had her headphones cranked to where I could recognize the beat as the one from “A Milli” by Lil Wayne. I could also make out that there was a female vocalist singing on top. It sounded pretty cool. I put it out to Twitter to see if anyone knew what it was. Rafi Kam hipped me to Joya Bravo’s freestyle in the back of a dollar van. It’s not the one I was looking for but it’s much better, you do not want to miss it.
Today the Michael Jackson fan art I have on my mind (and on the ipod) is “Please Don’t Stop The Music,” sung by Rihanna and produced by a couple of Norwegian guys. It includes a samples of MJ singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” The sample includes both his quasi-Swahili chant and his unearthly woo-hoo. It runs under almost the entire song after the first minute, with dramatic filter sweeping and what sounds like some vocoder.
MJ never made a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” leaving a vacuum that the fans are only too happy to fill. This video even includes footage of MJ’s video game.
This MJ song has inspired a lot of fan art, maybe because it is itself fan art. The music industry likes to send lawyers after people who make fan art, which is dumb and self-destructive on their part. No fan art, no art.
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 case.
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 II, and plays them back to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz. The exact same technology is used on the soundtrack by Yello for their song “Oh Yeah.”
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.
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 of many close contenders is In a Silent Way. It’s one of his first jazz-funk records, and there are no traditional songs on it. Each side is a single long track, pieced together by Miles and producer Teo Macero from excerpts of long improvisations. Earlier Miles albums had used tape editing to create seamless suites and to composite different takes of the same tune together. In A Silent Way was the first Miles album to use the mixing desk as a fundamental compositional tool. Miles and his producer remixed the improvs into something unambiguously new.
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly it had been used as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated control surface.
