Friday, February 26, 2010
The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording. I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting [...]
Filed in hardware, music, software
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Also tagged analog, audio, audio editing, autotune, book, computers, electronica, hip-hop, improvisation, looping, mashups, music, pro tools, recording, remixes, revival revival, sampling, synths, tape, tape editing, visualization
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Sunday, February 21, 2010
The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common [...]
Filed in music, science
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Also tagged cassettes, dna, evolution, family, genealogy, memes, midi, music theory, originality, sample maps, sampling, songwriting
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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 [...]
Filed in music, software
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Also tagged dna, electronica, evolution, funk, funky drummer, hip-hop, james brown, memes, midi, mutation, recursion, recycle, remixes, sampling, songwriting, visualization
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
Over the weekend we stayed with Anna’s sister Joanna, her husband Chris and their adorable new baby Lucas. Chris and I spent some of the time talking about electronic music and the internet. He’s a social media professional and a music fan but not a musician, and it was cool to hear his perspective on [...]
Filed in music, software, web
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Also tagged book, daft punk, delicious, design, drum machines, electronica, fun, interface, internet, inudge, minimalism, multitracking, reason, remixes, social media, tenori-on, toys, visualization, web browser
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Björk knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrument textures. Her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by her. I’m glad I hung in there, because she’s been one of my best teachers in [...]
Filed in music
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Also tagged audio editing, bjork, book, depression, electronica, hipster, iceland, interface, lord of the rings, missy elliot, pro tools, recording, remixes, sampling, timbaland, tolkien
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This is a picture of my electronic funk-soul-R&B band doing a show. From left to right, it’s Nicole Bishop, me and Barbara Singer. We were the whole band for that show. I did all the beats, samples and keyboards from my computer using a video game controller. Here’s a screenshot of the program that the [...]
Filed in autobio, hardware, music, software, video games
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Also tagged book, composing, electronica, hip-hop, improvisation, interface, keybs, mapping, max/msp, midi, programming, reason, sampling, synths, video games
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Expanding on “Learning Music Theory With Autotune” If you’re a science geek and you find yourself in San Francisco, the most fun thing to do there is to go to the Exploratorium.
Filed in hardware, math, music, science, video games
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Also tagged audio editing, book, coltrane, exploratorium, giant steps, india, keybs, lego, midi, music theory, pitch, pitch shifting, tetris, tuning, video games
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I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on some dude’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of [...]
Filed in hardware, math, music, science, software
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Also tagged book, computers, drum machines, eighties, electronica, emotion, funk, herbie hancock, interface, jazz, keybs, music, quincy jones, sesame street, synths
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People have been experimenting with using recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years, but the concept didn’t explode into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie Hancock’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song [...]
Filed in music
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Also tagged book, breakdancing, drum machines, eighties, electronica, funk, herbie hancock, hip-hop, jazz, keybs, music, pop, remixes, synths, turntablism, vocoder
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In my laptop band Revival Revival, we use Reason for all of our instrumental sounds and sample playback. The newest version has a handy color-coding feature in the sequencer, which makes it easy for me to be able to keep track of which part of which song happens in which order. Having all the tunes [...]
Filed in music, software
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Also tagged book, electronica, hip-hop, mashups, music, music notation, notation, reason, recursion, revival revival, sampling, screencaps, symmetry, visualization
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