Carmen McRae was a good friend of Monk’s, and for my tastes, she sings this song better than anyone. Her tart, unsentimental intellect matches Monk’s own approach to music perfectly. Here she is performing “Round Midnight” in 1962.

Monk wrote his biggest hit back in the late 1930s, but he didn’t have a recording contract at the time and couldn’t get anyone else interested. A few years later, however, his luck changed. His friend Bud Powell was playing piano in a band led by former Ellington Orchestra trumpet star Cootie Williams. Powell convinced Williams to record “Round Midnight” in 1944.

The record made an impact, and “Round Midnight” became Cootie Williams’ theme song. Other musicians became interested in the tune as well. Dizzy Gillespie did a recording in 1947, for which he wrote his own distinctive intro and ending.

Monk himself liked Dizzy’s intro and ending so much that he promptly began including them in his own performances of his tune.

Later in 1947, Monk finally got to record his tune for the first time.

Much as I love Monk’s own playing, this recording is an awkward one, with a lame-sounding film noir arrangement in the horns. Fortunately, Monk recorded “Round Midnight” many more times over the course of his life. He tended to play it quite a bit faster and more abstractly than other interpreters. Here’s a live version from sometime in the sixties.

Monk’s best recordings of the tune were solo piano versions. My favorite is the one on The Composer, which sadly isn’t available on YouTube. The one on Thelonious Himself is good too.

The definitive version of “Round Midnight” is the one by Miles Davis, as recorded on his 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight (a widely used alternate name for the tune.)

Miles honed this arrangement in performances for years before finally recording it. He plays Dizzy’s intro on muted trumpet, in a severely stripped-down form. His take on the melody is similarly minimalist, using many fewer notes than the original. At the end of the head at 2:40, Miles inserts a whole new section of his own invention, a shout chorus that jumps unexpectedly into major tonality, played on unmuted trumpet. The shout chorus sets up John Coltrane’s assertive and energetic tenor sax solo. Then Miles brings the mood back down with his muted take on Dizzy’s ending. This recording was a jukebox hit in black neighborhoods, and it went a long way toward cementing Miles’ iconic status in the jazz world. If you had to explain jazz to a visitor from outer space, you could do worse than this recording.

Every jazz singer has attempted “Round Midnight” at one point or another. To pick one of many great versions, here’s Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by Oscar Peterson.

As do most singers, Ella omits the intro and ending. The most complete vocal version, and maybe the most beautiful, is by Carmen McRae again, from her highly recommended 1988 album Carmen Sings Monk.

Everything’s here: all the sections, with the melody as written and also as interpreted by Dizzy Gillespie, all with lyrics. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the last word on “Round Midnight” — at least until the next evolution.

Hip-hop might point the way forward. The intro to Luchi De Jesus‘ recording of “Round Midnight” is sampled in “A Friend” by KRS-One.

Want to try playing “Round Midnight” yourself? It’s well worth it, you’ll learn a lot about music that way. The problem is finding a decent chart. Be warned that some of the chords in the infamous Real Book version are wrong, and it also omits Dizzy’s intro and ending. A more accurate transcription can be found in Hal Leonard’s lovingly rendered Thelonious Monk Fake Book, but that chart also leaves out the intro and ending. When I did the tune with my former jazz group, I decided to just transcribe the missing sections myself. Feel free to download my chart here.

Any crucial versions I missed? Leave them in the comments.

For hip-hop, sampling and everything related:

• Questlove
• Kevin Nottingham
• Whosampled
• Grown Folks Music
• Wayne Marshall
• Hank Shocklee
• Jeff Chang

For technology:

• Deb Chachra
• Tara Busch
• Paul Lamere

For the highbrow and avant-garde:

• Marc Weidenbaum
• Nick Seaver

Just generally:

• DJ Rupture
• Sasha Frere-Jones
• Sarah Badr

Happy reading.

Original question on Quora

There’s no way to separate out the different tracks from a mixed song. If you want the vocals isolated, you need to get your hands on the acapella version of the song. DJ versions of pop and hip-hop singles often include the acapella and instrumental. Every so often a band will sell or give away “stems” — tracks with each instrument isolated. Stems also sometimes leak onto the web. Google is your friend here.

If you can’t get your hands on acapellas, instrumentals or stems, you can still do a lot of creative mashing up. Look for sections that are “in the clear,” where one instrument plays in isolation. Intros, endings and breakdown sections are good places to look for samples. I’m especially fond of laying a funky rhythm section break under a jazz or folk song, for example the breakdown of “1999″ by Prince under “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan.

As for how to learn: just do it, do it, do it. The web is loaded with useful tutorials. Find some other DJs and remixers and ask for tips, or collaborate. The beauty of the digital music world is that busting out tracks and sharing them for comments and criticism costs nothing but your time. Don’t be too precious about your ideas. Get your tracks finished and play them for other people as often you can. After you do a couple dozen, they’ll start sounding musical, and after a hundred you’ll have some stuff that you’re proud of. Most importantly: have fun.

Here my recent remixes and mashups, enjoy:

Original post on Quora

Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.

Self-reference makes loops possible, which is great for programming. But sometimes the computer gets stuck in those loops. XKCD gives a playful illustration of how this can happen, using ducks.

We experience these infinite loops as computer crashes. The computer isn’t “stuck” when it crashes; it’s just running the same few instructions over and over.

The computer can’t break its own loops by “stepping outside of itself;” it needs an external agent to intervene, like you hitting the reset button.

The operations of our minds are also heavily recursive and self-referential. But unlike computers, we aren’t prone to getting stuck in loops, and we seem to be unfazed by logical paradoxes. Some of us even find them beautiful. Nature is full of self-similar, “paradoxical” structures like fractals.

Biological systems are especially self-similar and fractal-like.
Our brains are full of recursive loops. The brain’s representation of itself to itself is probably the basis of our consciousness.

The profoundest truths take on the quality of strange loops, GEB’s useful shorthand for recursive paradoxes. Here’s a diagram I made of the “heterarchy” of human knowledge.

Bach isn’t the only musician to use recursion and self-reference. Hip-hop and other sample-based music use it too, in the form of artists sampling their own songs within their own songs. Here are some blog posts digging into this idea.

• Biggie Biggie Smalls Is The Illest
• Eric B and Rakim
• Nas Is Like
• In A Silent Way is a remix of itself
• Self-reference in computer programming and hip-hop
• Take it to the bridge

Hofstadter also tackles the concept of emergence, the way that an intelligent mind can arise from the interaction of unintelligent component. He compares the mind to an anthill — the collective ant colony has intelligence, even though the individual ants are dumb.

Finally, the book is the best introduction to Zen Buddhist thinking that I’ve come across. Hofstadter observes that westerners are used to thinking in terms of neat Manichean categories — profound truths are unambiguously true or false. Zen prepares the mind to deal with Gödelian paradoxes, strange loops, fractals and the like.

I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in reading GEB from cover to cover. It’s not really that kind of book. I prefer to just open to a random page and struggle with whatever concept I find there. I recommend a similar approach.

Original post on Quora

Marcel Duchamp

In ancient times and more traditional societies, there was never much importance attached to the concept of sole authorship or ownership of creative works. Widespread belief in the lone Byronic genius didn’t take hold until the eighteenth century in Europe. Duchamp signaled the beginning of the end of the Byronic genius with his readymades, like the infamous urinal, or this bicycle wheel:

Duchamp also remixed the Mona Lisa by painting on a mustache and goatee and writing a dirty joke on the bottom.

I appreciate Duchamp’s art-historical significance, but find him to be too much of a wiseass for my tastes. I like my visual art a little more sincere.

Joseph Cornell

As a college student, I saw my first Cornell boxes, and was knocked out of my socks by them.

I didn’t know at the time why I liked Cornell’s boxes so much, but now I do. I come from a family of congenital pack rats, and Cornell shows a way to turn that neurosis into art. By combining stuff he found in dime stores, pictures cut out of magazines, and junk he found on the street, Cornell was effectively making three-dimensional mashups. Cornell himself was a weird and creepy guy, but, man, I love the work.

Cornell boxes have spawned a genre unto themselves. I see a lot of knockoffs out there, and I tend to like them better than most of what’s happening in the contemporary art scene. My sister did a whole series of them using fruit crates; here’s the one she made about my dad:

Tom Phillips and A Humument

My favorite contemporary visual remix work is Tom Phillips’ multi-decade project, A Humument. The work consists of drawings and paintings done on pages from A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, a Victorian novel that Phillips chose at random. Read the full story on Phillips’ web site. Here are some representative pages:

And here’s a side-by-side comparison of before and after:

Web memes

The internet loves visual remixes, and has unleashed wave after wave of web memes based on the idea. Maybe they’re a little less highbrow than the above examples, but they have their own charm.

We live in a world overstuffed with meaningful objects. Making new objects seems ridiculous in such a world. Better to recontextualize existing, familiar materials, giving them new meaning by combining them in unexpected ways. That’s exactly how I feel about music, too. Music is intrinsically a collage form anyway — all “original” music is assembled from pre-existing chords, scales, rhythms, melodic motifs and so on. I think our culture would be healthier if we could bring musical collage above ground and give it the same respect we give to Duchamp and Cornell.

DJ BC also did a remarkable album-length mashup of Jay-Z and Brian Eno:

Speaking of Jay, it’s a cliche by now, but Danger Mouse’s Grey Album really is a remarkable piece of work.

For creative use of pop, you’ve got to love DJ Earworm’s United State Of Pop series.

Diplo and M.I.A. deserve props for Piracy Funds Terrorism, especially their reworking of “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

The Walsh brothers did the best Wu-Tang mashup I’ve ever heard: Wugazi!

Finally, I don’t know if I’m one of the best mashup artists, but I’m pretty darn good.

Mashups by ethanhein

Additional recommendations are welcome in the comments.

Original post on Quora

Girl Talk uses comparatively primitive software for his mashups, so his process is labor-intensive. If you want to make life easier for yourself, get a hold of Ableton Live. Once you get a hang of the user interface, it’s a wonderfully versatile sampling and remixing tool. Before I got Ableton, I used a combination of various audio editors, Recycle and Reason, which worked well enough, but was a pain. Ableton is better.

Original question on Quora

And here’s the full song — contains much explicit language.

The hook samples the line “Biggie Smalls is the illest” from “The What” on the same album. It’s twenty-three seconds in.

Sampling is a severely underappreciated songwriting tool. Even if you have moral or legal issues with sampling from others, sampling from yourself is still a good idea. Biggie’s line about himself being the illest is just part of a verse in “The What.” The producer on “Unbelievable,” the great DJ Premier, was smart enough to recognize that Biggie’s line could stand on its own as a hook. DJ Premier also produced “Nas Is Like,” and built its chorus through similar means.

The word “Unbelievable” itself comes from R Kelly, sped up a little and raised in pitch to sound female. Listen at 0:58.

Sampled vocals aside, the chopped-up keyboard part is the most musically sophisticated aspect of the track. Its original source is “Remind Me” by Patrice Rushen — I’m pretty sure it comes from the end of the solo section around 4:10.

Premier chopped up this little keyboard phrase and resequenced it beyond recognition. The result is a hip angularity that a normal keyboard player would probably not have arrived at organically.

The beat in “Unbelievable” is an old standby, “Impeach The President.”

The string ambiance in the background comes from the very odd Quincy Jones song “Kitty With The Bent Frame.” Listen at 1:08.

Quincy’s record is a favorite for hip-hop producers looking for an uneasy mood.

Here’s a diagram showing the sample genealogy of “Unbelievable.”

The meaning of self-sampling

Like I said above, self-sampling is so interesting to me because it’s recursive, self-referential. Most of the music we like is full of self-reference, and generally, the more self-referential it is, the more structured and meaningful it feels. Even simple-seeming nursery rhymes can be recursive and self-similar. Here’s a visualization by Lee Byron showing self-similarity in the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

Self-similarity makes for compelling visual art, too. One reason we find nature attractive is its rich fractal self-similarity. Here’s a leaf I photographed in my neighborhood; notice how the same veiny structure repeats itself at different size scales:

Even very simple recursive mathematical equations can produce stunningly complex, biological-looking forms, like the classic fractal known as the Mandelbrot set.

Recursion isn’t just attractive. It’s fundamental to computer science — self-reference is a key programming technique. Recursion may be essential to the very nature of consciousness itself. Some neuroscientists think that your entire sense of self emerges out of recursive self-referential loops as your brain represents different parts of itself to itself.

No wonder recursive music is so fascinating. Keep on sampling yourselves, musicians; let’s see what other recursive truths we can uncover.

Let’s say one of the umpteen copyright holders sampled by Girl Talk decides to go after him. Greg Gillis is white, nerdy and well-educated. He’s a generally sympathetic, press-friendly defendant with a rabid online following. If the copyright holder wins, the internet will rise up as one in protest, resulting in a public relations disaster that’ll cost way more than any amount of money that could conceivably be wrung out of Gillis. If the hypothetical copyright holder loses, it opens the floodgates to unlicensed sampling under Fair Use, which right now has tenuous status at best as a legal argument. Rights holders prefer the status quo, where the law is murky and everyone is so nervous that they mostly license their samples. Girl Talk might be popular, but until unlicensed mashups dominate the pop charts, the music industry will probably just keep ignoring them.

I should add that Schwimmer himself owns and loves all of Girl Talk’s albums. I think Gillis is pretty safe.

Original question on Quora

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

“Amen, Brother” is an uptempo adaptation of “Amen” by Jester Hairston, written for the movie Lilies of the Field, and made famous by The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield, before he went solo.)

“Amen, Brother” didn’t get much attention until crate-digging hip-hop producers started sampling the drum break in the 1980s. Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Since then, the break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen shows up in rock and pop songs ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It’s in TV theme songs and commercials. Casual music listeners have probably heard it in dozens if not hundreds of recordings. Here’s a family tree showing the most noteworthy usages.

As is so often the case in sample history, GC Coleman never got a dime from any of these uses beyond his union scale for the original recording session. He died in 2006, so there’s not much we can do for him now, but I think he at least deserves some recognition.

Inside the break

Here’s the Amen break, looped four times:

Amen break by ethanhein

Wikipedia has handy drum notation and drum machine tablature for the break.

Here’s how the break looks in the sampling program Recycle:

Each blue spiky blob is a drum hit. The vertical lines are slices I added using Recycle. Once you’ve sliced up the loop, you can play the slices back in any order and any combination using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. You can generate an infinite variety of new loops this way.

Two documentaries on the Amen break

The usual reference for the Amen break is this twenty-minute video by Nate Harrison.

Here’s an hour-long podcast on the break by Crissy Criss:

Noteworthy Amen break samples

I’m not attempting anything resembling completeness here; these are just tracks I like or find interesting. Starting in the eighties with the old skool, here’s “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix.

In “I Desire,” Salt N Pepa mixes the Amen with drums from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the synth line from “Daisy Lady” by 7th Wonder.

Maybe the best-known hip-hop usage of the Amen is NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (very, very NSFW.)

The break appears in pitched-down form at the very beginning of “Informer” by Snow. What the heck is he saying in the chorus, anyway?

As I said above, the Amen is most closely associated with drum ‘n’ bass, for example “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja.

Luke Vibert did an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews where just about every song uses a variation on the Amen break.

An artsier take on the Amen: “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin.

Even artsier: Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife.”

David Bowie uses the Amen for his foray into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, “Little Wonder.” It’s not one of his strongest tunes but he gets huge points for trying.

The most current hip-hop song I could find that uses the Amen is Lupe Fiasco’s “Streets On Fire.”

Many, many more examples can be found on the Amen Break Database and Whosampled.com.

The Amen break on TV

As the Nate Harrison documentary points out, the Amen pops up in quite a few TV commercials. It’s made its way into some theme songs, too, most notably the one from Futurama:

The Amen also shows up in the Powerpuff Girls theme song.

Do you still think that sampling is stealing? I don’t mean monetarily, I mean artistically. Do you think that there’s something unoriginal in all these uses of the Amen break? Do you think that the way Aphex Twin or Lupe Fiasco recontextualizes the break is somehow a lesser creative act than getting out a drum kit and playing something? You can probably guess where I stand.

Why is the Amen break so magical?

Producers talk about how funky and passionate the Amen is, how compressed and dirty the drum sounds are, how much hip syncopation it uses in its second half. But what if there’s a mathematical explanation for the break’s popularity? Michael Schneider has a theory that the Amen Break sounds so good because it’s structured around the golden ratio.

Is there anything to this theory? You be the judge.

Try it yourself

Here’s my mashup of many of the above tracks, with heavy processing of the Amen break in Recycle and Reason.

Amen Brother megamix by ethanhein

If you want to play too, the internet is full of resequenced and reshuffled variations on the Amen break available for your downloading pleasure. Here are a hundred fifty Amen loops. Here’s another forty and yet another twenty. Stick them in your favorite audio editor and have fun!