I’ve had a lot of music teachers, formal and informal. The best one has been the computer. It mindlessly plays anything I tell it to, over and over. Hearing an idea played back on a continuous loop tells me quickly if it’s good or not. If the idea is bad, I immediately get annoyed, and if it’s good, I’ll cheerfully listen to it loop for hours. There’s something in the cumulative experience of a loop that makes it greater than the sum of the individual listens. Good loops create a meditative, trance-like state, like Buddhist mantras you can dance to. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s the right groove, there’s no such thing as too much repetition. Take “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.
At the end, they repeat “Naah, na na nanana naah, nanana naah, hey Jude” over and over for four minutes. I could listen to it for forty minutes. Why don’t I get bored? (more…)
The current fetish for originality in music is partially an outgrowth of copyright law. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales. The influence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles further created the expectation that popular musicians would mostly be writing their own material. Before the mid-sixties, it was a different story. Pop and jazz artists were mostly interpreting existing, familiar material, and only rarely writing new stuff. Even the most prolific and brilliant jazz composers like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk devoted album after album to arrangements of standards. Nobody arranged standards more radically and personally than John Coltrane.
Coltrane’s arrangement of this tune bears the same relationship to the one in The Sound Of Music as “Hard Knock Life” by Jay-Z bears to Annie. Jazz arranging uses different technology than sampling and remixing, but it makes the same musical statement. It’s a stamp of personal ownership on a familiar piece of public musical property.
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 under my eyes all the time has revealed new wisdom to my ears about symmetry and asymmetry, and isn’t that what music is all about?
The color-coding system started as a simple information-management technique, but it ended up improving my ears. Spending so much time looking at these colorfully abstracted representations of so many songs, I couldn’t help but notice some patterns. I’ve done enough tracks now that I can lay something out in the sequencer and know that it’ll basically work without having to listen to it first. Classical and jazz musicians get to the point where by glancing over a score, they can hear it quite clearly in the mind’s ear. The Reason sequencer has a much shorter path into the brain’s deep sense-data processing centers because it’s dynamic, animated, and responsive to my thoughts in real time.
