Thursday, December 1, 2011
The word “groovy” originates in jazz slang, referring to music that’s swinging, tight, funky, in the pocket. The analogy is to the groove in a vinyl record — the musicians are so together that it’s like they’re the needle guided by the groove. The “groove” becomes generalized to any good rhythm, passage, or entire piece [...]
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
When teaching guitar, I find that my students need the most help with groove. Students come to me expecting to learn chords, scales, riffs and ultimately entire tunes. I do teach those things, but after a little guidance, anyone can learn them on their own just as well from books, videos, web sites and so [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged attention, funk, funky drummer, groove, guitar, hip-hop, linkedin, meditation, swing, time
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Today is the Fourth of July, and I can’t think of anything more patriotic than a post about our most significant contribution to world musical culture: swing. The title of this post refers to the classic Duke Ellington tune, sung here by Ray Nance. Check out the “yah yah” trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton. The [...]
Filed in Dance, Emotion, Music, Music Teaching
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Also tagged america, charles mingus, classical, count basie, drum machines, duke ellington, ella fitzgerald, funk, hip-hop, janet jackson, jazz, louis armstrong, ray nance, soul, swing, syncopation, tchaikovsky, time, tricky sam nanton
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I have a theory that what people find most interesting in music is self-reference, recursion and fractal-like scale-invariance. Rhythms based on powers of two are a great way to get this kind of recursion because they can be compounded or subdivided so easily. A bar of four can be treated as two bars of two, [...]
Friday, December 17, 2010
I’ve always been more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy, but respect where respect is due, “Gimme Shelter” is a classic. 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 [...]
Filed in Music, Recording, Video Games
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Also tagged audio editing, guitar, keith richards, merry clayton, michael jackson, Recording, remixes, rock, rolling stones, Sampling, singing, sixties, tuning
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I wrote a general post about what makes a hot beat hot. As a followup, here’s how to program some generic patterns and a few famous breakbeats. The basic unit of dance music is a sequence of sixteen eighth notes, two measures of four-four time. Drum machines like the Roland TR-808 represent the sixteen eighth [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Software
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Also tagged dance, drum machines, drumming, funky drummer, hip-hop, hone, honey drippers, james brown, led zeppelin, looping, programming, rock, time
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Turntablists use record players to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. The record player as musical instrument is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound [...]
Filed in Hardware, Improvisation, Interfaces, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged a tribe called quest, afrika bambaataa, apache, dj, dj premier, funky drummer, grand mixer dst, grandmaster flash, herbie hancock, hip-hop, Improvisation, looping, mashups, music notation, peter piper, rahzel, remixes, rockit, run-dmc, Sampling, scratch, turntablism, visualization, wu-tang
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The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer” but there are some contenders. The compilation [...]
Filed in Evolution, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged drumming, Evolution, funk, funky drummer, james brown, lil mama, michael jackson, Music, percussion, primates, queen, remixes, rnb, Sampling, seventies, sixties, soul, steven mithen, stone age
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We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re [...]
Filed in Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Music Theory, Software
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Also tagged audience participation, clocks, drumming, Evolution, john coltrane, Music, pro tools, quantum, rubato, steven mithen, time
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Here’s a more specific post on programming various well-known beats. The brain is a pattern recognition machine. We like repetition and symmetry. But we only like it up to a point. Once we’ve recognized and memorized the pattern, we get bored and stop paying attention. If the pattern changes or breaks, it grabs our attention [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Music Teaching
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Also tagged dance, drum machines, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, looping, meditation, Music, programming, questlove, recursion, repetition, time
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