When I was a kid, the New York Transit Museum had a commercial in heavy rotation on local TV that used “Take The A Train” and I remember being riveted by it. I should point out that Billy Strayhorn wrote this tune, not Ellington, but it became the Ellington Orchestra’s theme song for decades.

When I was in sixth grade I got totally obsessed with my folks’ CD of Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included a recording of a tune called “Way Way Back” that I listened to every day after school for I don’t know how many days in a row.

I didn’t get exposed to much Ellington after that until college. When I was a sophomore I went to hear some friends playing in an informal sextet in the campus center. They played “Mood Indigo” and though I had never heard it before, it felt like it had always been part of me. A couple of years after that I came under the sway of Andy Jaffe, then Amherst’s jazz professor and a devout Ellington worshiper. He didn’t resolve the mystery of why Ellington and Strayhorn had such a powerful grip on my emotional brain, but he did certainly expose me to a lot more of their music, in a much more rigorous analytic framework. I’ve been a fan, student and interpreter of Ellingtonia ever since.

My usual reaction when I love something is to remix it. So, here we go.

The Money Jungle Remix Project

I’m working on an album-length revisioning of Money Jungle, the trio album Duke did with Charles Mingus and Max Roach. This album is a pretty crazy one, a must-hear for jazz nerds.

Take The 2-3 Train

Combines the intro to “A Train” with samples of Slick Rick, Britney Spears and M.I.A., along with synths I played on a video game controller.

Morning Mood

Combining the opening to Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of Grieg’s Peer Gynt, with percussion by Glen Velez and some snippets of the a capella from “Get Ur Freak On” by Missy Elliot.

Lay-By

The swinging violin is by Ray Nance, who also played the famous trumpet solo on the original recording of “A Train.”

“Morning Mood” and “Lay-By” come from the amazing Three Suites album. The first suite is Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of the Nutcracker, which to my ears is a substantial improvement over the original.

The second suite, as mentioned above is Peer Gynt, less known but also pretty rad.

The third suite was inspired by John Steinbeck’s book Sweet Thursday.

I’ve never read the book, but it inspired four devastating Ellington/Strayhorn tunes, some of their best late-period work, including the Ray Nance feature “Lay-By.” The band kills it on the recording, too.

I went to a panel discussion of Duke’s later music at Amherst that included Stanley Crouch. During his talk, he summed up his feelings about Duke’s drummer on the suites, Sam Woodyard, like so:

Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard!

I don’t agree with Stanley Crouch on a lot of jazz-related issues, but I agree with him on that one.

Revival Revival vs Nirvana

mp3 download, ipod format download

Vocals and guitar by Barbara. Additional guitar, controller synth, 808 programming and sampling by me. Contains some salty language.

This continues our recent push into mostly original rock material about Barbara’s complex romantic life. The sample comes from one of my favorite Nirvana songs.

Oh, the nineties. I’m not as angry as Kurt Cobain and didn’t have much love for Nirvana in their heyday. But Mr Cobain writes a great melody, and the band has grown on me in my old age. It’s become something of a cliche for young hipster jazz musicians to do Nirvana songs, but they work great, they have those nice doom-filled minor key chord progressions.

I’ve had the “Hey wait” sample sitting on my hard drive for basically ever. Barbara had this song she had written, and we wanted a sample to lay over it to make it more memetastic. “Hey wait” was the first one we tried. Then we tried about seventy other hooks from other hard rock songs, and none of them worked nearly as well. Barbara was pretty excited to work a Nirvana sample into an electronic dance track of the kind Kurt probably hated. I like to imagine that maybe he would have thought it was cool.

There’s much to love about this album beyond its joyously ridiculous science fiction theme. There are the deft, bebop-flavored horn charts by James Brown’s trombonist Fred Wesley. There are the irresistible beats by Jerome Brailey, who laid the rhythmic foundation of hip-hop (along with Clyde Stubblefield and the Incredible Bongo Band.) And there are the squiggly Moog synths by Bernie Worrell.

Bernie’s hottest lick out of many on this album is the one that kicks off “Do That Stuff:”

Bernie’s little synth phrase has had a long musical life outside its original context. Nice And Smooth used it as the hook for their classic “Funky For You.”

“Funky For You” made a big enough impact on hip-hop to have been sampled itself quite a few times. Red Hot Lover Tone used it on “Wanna Make Moves,” featuring Greg Nice himself.

The sample works just as well outside hip-hop. Röyksopp used it just last year in their delightful dance track, “Happy Up Here:”

The most exciting part of this track for me is the bridge, when Röyksopp transposes the sample to fit over a dramatic chord progression. I love it when samplers do this kind of adventurous reharmonizing, it brings electronic music closer to the intellectual spirit of jazz.

George Clinton has always been enthusiastically positive about the use of P-funk samples in hip-hop and elsewhere (though the owners of his copyrights aren’t nearly so open-minded, sadly.) Clinton’s pro-sampling attitude makes sense, given that he sometimes sampled from himself. “Do That Stuff” recycles a riff he used in an earlier song, “You Can’t Miss What You Can’t Measure” by Funkadelic.

Hear a mashup of all the tracks mentioned above:

Do That Stuff Megamix by ethanhein

The Clones Of Dr Funkenstein as a whole has been a rich source of inspiration for electronic musicians. Here’s a map of all the noteworthy samples; click through to see it bigger.

Bernie Worrell’s keyboards have had a bigger footprint in my music-listening life than just P-Funk and the many hip-hop songs sampling them. In the early eighties he was a regular guest member of Talking Heads. He plays on The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, Speaking In Tongues and Stop Making Sense. His plangent keyboard melody in “This Must Be The Place” is just begging to be sampled. Pretty much everything he’s put down sounds as fresh now as the day it was recorded. I want to go back and get more of that funky stuff!

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.

At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.

Sixties Motown

When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.

In the eighties, my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. I can’t argue with the musical qualities of the Big Chill tracks. The singing is full of emotional truth-telling. That said, the arrangements sound cynical and commercial to my ears now. All those strings weren’t exactly sticking it sonically to the man. The slickness of Motown drove me to eventually seek out…

Delta blues

Raw, intense, minimalist, tied to a specific time and place: this is as good a definition of musical authenticity as you could ask for. The fact that it’s being made by oppressed people is even better. I embody the cliched story of the white hipster going back through the Stones and Zeppelin and hearing all the music they were inspired by/stole from.

The blues is a powerful and truth-telling musical form. But my desire to participate in it quickly became a problem. Blues might have been authentic for Howlin’ Wolf, but for me, it’s an awkward fit. It’s not for lack of trying; I play the best white blues harmonica of anyone I know. The phrasing and microtones and general attitude have shaped my approach to every other style of music I’ve attempted. But if I was going to tell my own truth in music, I needed to find something socially a little closer to home. Jerry Garcia helpfully steered me towards…

Bluegrass

As the fans like to say, bluegrass is sung from the heart through the nose. It has all the earmarks of regional authenticity, including an apparent lack of concern with finding a wide audience.

As with blues, I ran up against some immediate cultural tourism issues when I started exploring this music. It’s easy for a New Yorker like me to condescend unintentionally, treating bluegrass as “pure” because its practitioners are supposedly unsophisticated hicks, and therefore “unspoiled.” The true story is more complicated. The bluegrass guys might be rural, but they most assuredly are not dumb. Bill Monroe conceived bluegrass partially on a commercial basis, choosing repertoire and instruments that appealed to the audiences of his time and place. Also, bluegrass requires a lot of technical skill, especially for the lead instruments like banjo and fiddle. It’s not a good genre for the casual dabbler. Besides, by the time I dug into this music I was also starting to get interested in…

Monk and Coltrane

One way to define authenticity is through exclusivity. Bluegrass excludes casual dabblers with its technical demands. But bluegrass isn’t remotely as demanding as bebop. This is part of the reason why bebop is as untainted by commercial success as any snobby hipster could wish. Hard jazz is consistently the worst-selling genre in America, year in and year out.

Monk and Coltrane don’t fit into the bebop box exactly, even though they helped define its sound. They’re good avatars of purity because of the extreme individualism of their respective sounds. Any three-second sample of either of them is instantly recognizable. Monk isn’t as impenetrable as his reputation would suggest — several of his tunes have melodies a normal person could whistle. Coltrane wrote some nicely approachable tunes too, but he gets extra authenticity points for spending his last few years playing harshly avant-garde experimental music.

I’d recommend that any musician tackle bebop if they want a rigorous education in American music generally. It’s all in there: the blues, the showtunes, the highbrow and the lowbrow, all the chords and scales and rhythms and textures our culture has to offer, at least up until the advent of electronic music. But much as I love it, bebop never really felt like home to me. I’ll continue to study Monk and Trane and their cohorts, and will continue to enjoy and be inspired by them, but if I want to express my experience in the present reality, they don’t have all the answers I need.

Klezmer

Okay, so if urban black or rural white music is an awkward fit for a New York Jew, how about the music of the tribe? Klezmer is culturally close to home for me. It straddles the shtetl and the big city, the old country and the new one, ancient folk forms and American pop.

Klezmer sometimes gets called “Jewish jazz” but a better comparison is to country. There’s the oompah-derived boom-chick beat, the harmonic minimalism, the melodic improvisation, and the emphasis on rawness and feeling over technical complexity. The scales are different — you don’t get a lot of Ahava Raba scale in country. But the comparison is close otherwise. Discovering this music was a key puzzle piece for me; I use those Arabic scales any chance I get. Klezmer’s mutt-like fusion of disparate styles is a truer statement of myself than anything that could be described as pure. Unfortunately, klezmer isn’t a great way to connect with other people aside from other NYC hipsters with Jewish ancestry, so it was never going to be my ultimate destination. But I’m glad to have gotten acquainted.

The impenetrable avant-garde

You could define authenticity as an uncompromising commitment to inner truth, the desire to please others be damned. There’s something noble and admirable in this commitment. The problem is that the furthest reaches of inner space don’t usually produce music that other people can connect to. I never enjoyed extremely experimental music, but the academic world and critical establishment hold it in high regard. As an educated highbrow type, I felt like I had to dutifully subject myself to a lot of avant-garde experiments in an effort to purge myself of my weak-minded desire for music to be fun. I guess I learned a few things about the limits of human tolerance, but mostly I learned that I really do just want to have fun. Here’s a hilarious quote from “Can Machine-Made Music Sing Without a Composer?” in New York Magazine:

[O]n February 5, the Fireworks Ensemble will perform a live version of Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 album Metal Machine Music, at Miller Theatre. Listening to Reed’s original double LP is a test of endurance. In his garment-district loft, he leaned various electric guitars against their amps so that they howled at each other in crescendoing feedback loops, and welded the tracks into deafening industrial polyphony. The result was one of the most loathed records ever to hit the market. Nevertheless, the intrepid composer Ulrich Krieger decided to arrange it for traditional instruments, an undertaking that smacks of flagellant zeal.

I like the word “flagellant.” We just can’t shake our puritan roots, can we? There’s a lingering notion that painful music has the deepest purity. I’m grateful to have rid myself of this silly idea. Deliberately annoying music seems to me now to just be another form of class competition, its flamboyant uselessness a bigger statement of materialist affectation than any crassly commercial pop.

Fake is the new real

So where has the authenticity quest ultimately led me? As a kid I loved Michael Jackson and Run-DMC to pieces, but as I got a “music education,” I felt morally obligated to reject their music for their sinful use of drum machines, synthesizers and borrowing other people’s ideas. Most especially, I felt I had to reject them for their emphasis on pleasing people above all other musical concerns. Now pleasing people seems to me to be the only good reason to make music. If “fake” and accessible sounds like synths and drum machines put bodies on the dance floor, then fake is better than real.

I’ve had an instinctive attraction to electronic music dating back to loving science fiction sound effects and scores as a kid. But my peers and educators pressured me to be suspicious and hostile towards high-tech, pop-friendly musicians like Herbie Hancock. Herbie’s acoustic piano work is acceptable to the guardians of the jazz canon, but controversy continues to roil over his embrace of the synthesizer, sequencer and the sounds on the radio.

I’m glad to have withdrawn from the battle over purity. Not everything you hear in clubs or parties is terrific, but rejecting it wholesale was getting me nowhere. Giving myself permission to enjoy pop-jazz fusion, Herbie’s seventies and eighties future sounds, hip-hop and dance music has opened up huge new continents of sonic enjoyment to me. Authenticity is about truth-telling. For a high-tech city dweller, loop-based electronic sounds are more truthful to my experience than banjos and mandolins. I’ve whole-heartedly embraced the whole bag of technological tricks: Auto-Tune, lip-synching, whatever you’ve got.

Musical authenticity is in the emotional content, not the tools used to make it. Many musicians of my acquaintance fetishize vintage gear. There’s the hope that if you play the same harmonica as Little Walter Jacobs through the same mic and the same amp, maybe some of that Little Walter Jacobs magic will rub off on you. No doubt, quality gear sounds good in the right hands. But the hands are more important than the gear. Good tools can make it easier to realize an idea, and can even spark ideas. But a lame, unpracticed or anxious harmonica player will sound lame, unpracticed or anxious no matter what. And there’s nothing inherently soulful or un-soulful about any instrument. Drum machines only sound inauthentic when they emulate human drummers. Drum machines are perfectly authentic when used for their uniquely posthuman quality. It all depends on the musician. Like Herbie Hancock says, the machine doesn’t program itself.

As of this moment, my favorite song is “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

Is it authentic? Not really. It panders to me on many levels, as a hip-hop head, an R&B fan and a patriotic New Yorker. But Jay and Alicia pander so well, the beat is so tight, the chord progression and melody are so energizing, who cares?

The concern over purity is really about exclusivity. A mutt like me is is no position to be excluding anyone. But then, no one really is in a position to be excluding anyone. The shocking truth of biological evolution is that if you go back far enough, we’re all cousins with each other, and if you go back further, we’re cousins with bats, bananas, and bacteria. I believe strongly that the rules of evolution apply to music too. Our music all descends from the same monkey calls, so who’s in a position to be disputing the musical methods of anyone else? You don’t have to like everything, but disliking something is no reason to call its basic validity into question.

Ms Heap is accompanying herself with artificial harmonies created by a Digitech Vocalist Workstation. The device reads her pitch in the manner of Auto-tune. She tells it what notes to shift her voice to using the MIDI keyboard. She also uses some digital delay for the echo effect, and towards the end, she samples herself singing the chorus so she can sing the last verse over the playback.

The result is one of the most futuristic sounds I’ve ever heard, and yet it’s also warm and intimate, not icily posthuman like you’d expect from such a high-tech performance. Because the harmony responds on the fly to her singing and keybs playing, she’s free to improvise, phrase and embellish in the moment. Real live choral harmony is cool and everything, but if you want multiple complex parts, you need to write everything out ahead of time, and conduct the singers exactly. It doesn’t leave much room for spontaneity, and spontaneity is key to truth-telling in music. When I say that “fake” technology can result in more real music, this is exactly what I mean. Here’s how Imogen Heap describes the writing of this song in an interview with Electronic Musician:

My favorite computer blew up on me, but I didn’t want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play ten notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It’s quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that’s a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn’t feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I’m not questioning that one at all.

Brian Eno says that for synths to have the soul of traditional instruments, they need to be a little bit unpredictable. All the glossy perfection the computer makes possible can get to be oppressive. You get the best results when you don’t have total control, when there’s room for the happy accident. By confusing the harmony algorithms, you can get unexpected notes that sound way more hip than anything you could have worked out on paper ahead of time. It’s why I’m so addicted to Auto-tune. If you set it right, it reacts in surprising ways, live as it’s happening, opening up new avenues of expression.

Some people think that artificial harmonizers and Auto-tune are dishonest, that they’re cheating, that they’re part of a larger trend towards fakery that’s destroying western civilization as we know it. We have an abiding anxiety about the authenticity of our music. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “authentic” descends from ancient Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal.” This word in turn descends from authentes, “one acting on one’s own authority,” a composite of autos, “self,” and hentes, “doer, being.” The related word “genuine” descends from the Latin genuinus meaning “native, natural,” from the root of gignere, “to beget.” The thinking goes that the word originally referred to paternity.

I think it’s reasonable to be concerned with the parentage of our music, but it’s wrong to be repulsed by the bastardized and the mongrel. All the really exciting music is hybridized. Hip-hop combines the phrasing and improvisation of jazz with European electronic beats. Jazz combines African-American traditions with European harmonies and song structures. Let’s have some mongrel pride! The president of the United States is a self-described mutt. So am I. Purity is lame.

By the way, gorgeously recorded a capellas are irresistable to samplers, so it’s no big surprise that someone would take an interest in using Imogen Heap samples. The best example I could find is Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say.” It won’t change your life or anything, but I give him props for venturing it. I feel less of an urge to sample Imogen Heap and more of an urge to get my hands on a Vocalist Workstation and try out some harmonies of my own.

For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association.

I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. I’ve been here:

In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.

Seinfeld is comfort food for me. It simulates hanging out with Mom, the Kramer clan and the majority of my schoolmates. It’s like how King Of The Hill and Garrison Keillor simulate my dad’s family. But Seinfeld has some authenticity problems. Like, we’re supposed to believe that George, Elaine and Kramer aren’t Jewish. Frank and Estelle Costanza are supposed to be Italian? Whatever. Cosmo Kramer? More like Schlomo Kramer. My sister’s nickname for the changing of Jewish names and identities to fit into America is the semantic nosejob.

A few other fakinesses of Seinfeld: the slap bass riff on the soundtrack is a sampling keyboard. Aside from a few outdoor establishing shots, the entire show was shot in Los Angeles, even the street scenes.

But for all its TV fakiness, Seinfeld is sometimes remarkably psychologically truthful.

Sometimes it even has Buddhist wisdom.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.” This kind of confident embracing of one’s own self with all its shortcomings is a powerful thing. It’s the basic psychological strategy at work in Barack Obama’s confessional writing. It conveys and inspires inner strength.

Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.

The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.

Hear the game controller in action on the synth in this track:

Take The 2-3 Train by ethanhein

The software maps the buttons and knobs on the controller to different MIDI values. I can play one octave of each of a few different scales (blues, major, harmonic and melodic minor, diminished) in all twelve keys. I can scroll through the circle of fifths with the controller’s D-pad. It’s set so that my left index and middle fingers control the root and third of the scale, my right index and middle control the fourth and fifth, and my right thumb reaches the rest of the scale tones. With the thumb sticks I can control pitch bend, modulation and other parameters, depending on which software instrument is dialed up.

The controller plays anything that any other MIDI instrument can play, not just synthesizers. I can map any batch of recorded sounds to the buttons. It’s fun loading bells or speech samples or bird calls onto it and playing them through heavy delay over a beat.

The controller interface software was written by Ben Lacker in Max/MSP. It works with any USB video game controller, but it was specifically designed for the one in the screenshot, a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.

I mostly played guitar in my bands through my twenties, using lots of digital delay and other high-tech effects. As my sound got more electronic I started using a keyboard hooked up to my laptop. For a while I was carrying around a Korg 49, which has a bunch of cool drum pads and control knobs in addition to a half-piano’s worth of keybs. It was way more controller than I needed. I felt kind of like a chump carrying such a big instrument around just to play one note while twiddling a knob for the entire song. Part of the motivation to set up the game controller was to be able to have the same control scheme on a device I could more easily carry around on the subway.

The Korg 49′s keys and drum pads are pressure-sensitive. The game controller isn’t. Its buttons have only has two settings, on and off. It offers no control of dynamics at all. This limitation has turned out to be mostly a good thing for live situations, and even for home sequencing. For samples especially, it sounds better to mix everything to a nice balance and then be forced to keep it that way. It moves my complete focus to rhythm. I can pitch bend or filter with the thumbsticks for expressiveness when I need it.

I’ve tried a few other game controllers with the MIDI interface program. Some of them show potential. The most intriguing one is the Dance Dance Revolution pad. It would be perfect if it didn’t map itself to strange MIDI parameters by default. Out of the box, half the buttons don’t do anything useful, and I don’t have the programming mojo to fix it. Maybe in the future I’ll get it ironed out. It could be like a customizable, more ergonomic version of the giant ground piano in Big, as seen in this extremely bootleg Youtube video.

The Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers have potential too, but they don’t have as many buttons or parameters as the Logitech pad. Same with the Taiko Drum Master controller. This is nothing against any of these controllers in their original contexts, where they work great. I haven’t gotten to try DJ Hero but I expect it’ll be a similar deal. The Nintendo Wii controller is becoming the game controller of choice for futuristic computer musicians. I haven’t used one for anything except games yet, but there are some cool-looking things on my list. Specifically, I’m looking forward to experimenting with Wii Loop Machine and Wii Drum High. There are also some groovy-looking things for the Game Boy DS, like Korg DS-10 and Nitrotracker. For all of the above plus iPhone there’s a thing called Osculator that looks fun.

I slept on Prince straight through the eighties and most of the nineties. I was more of a Michael Jackson guy. Prince was a little too grown up for me. I definitely wasn’t ready for his naked butt in the cassette liner notes. He won me over when I learned how to play some of his songs with bands. We did “Let’s Go Crazy” in my non-serious college hipster cover band. A few years later I played with a singer-songwriter named Kimberly West, and we had “Kiss” in the set list for a while as a straight-ahead cover.

“Kiss” is one of the most pleasurable songs I’ve ever played on guitar. The solo and fills are as tightly structured as if Prince copied and pasted them together with a sampler. For all I know, that’s how he comes up with all of his guitar parts. The harmony is jagged and angular, based on tritones, and that tension balances out the smooth rhythms well. The wah-wah pedal part is as structured as the drum machine part. And he’s got synth marimba under there! Futuristic stuff.

My more recent connection with Prince is that my sister has been living in Minneapolis, where he was born and where he still lives and works. It’s a much hipper place than you would think given its midwestern surroundings. Along with Prince, the Minneapolis music scene has produced Bob Dylan and Garrison Keillor. I can’t quite figure out the pattern there, but all three of those guys are fearlessly idiosyncratic and committed to a personal sound.

“Prince”, by the way, is not a stage name. His given name is Prince Rogers Nelson. It’s an optimistic name, and Prince is a confident guy. I guess that’s why I resisted him as a self-doubting angst-ridden teenager. Now it’s why I like him.

Prince has mostly produced his music by sequencing drums and synths and layering live instruments on top. For most of his classic hits, he did beats on a Linn LM-1 drum machine. He did his synths and sampled instruments with a Fairlight CMI. See a demonstration of this instrument by Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones.

Prince hasn’t done a whole lot of sampling, but when he does, he chooses like a hip-hop producer. He used George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” on his song “Style.” George Clinton returned the compliment by sampling Prince’s “Sex” on his song “Hysterical.”

In his song “Gett Off”, Prince used samples of “The Funky Drummer” and “There It Is” by James Brown and “Shack Up” by Banbarra.

“Gett Off” has itself been sampled in “Jump Around” by House Of Pain and “Funk Liberation” by X-Clan.

Prince is also supposed to have borrowed the main riff in “1999″ from the backing vocal part in the first verse of “Monday, Monday” by The Mamas And The Papas. This inspired me to mash the two songs up, along with two other post-apocalyptic tunes, “99 Luftballons” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

1999 Luftballons by ethanhein

Finally, enjoy some Dave Chappelle.

Quoted on Chartreuse B’s Tumblr

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.

We think of sampling as this high-tech modern practice, but analog sampling keyboards go back to the early fifties. The first one was the Chamberlin. It played short tape recordings of a few different instruments when you pressed the keys. The Chamberlin has a much more famous descendant (some might say ripoff), the Mellotron. Here’s a little branding 101: don’t name your invention after yourself, unless you have a cool name like Robert Moog. Pick something retrofuture and groovy. The Mellotron sounds like something from Sleeper that you use between the Orb and the Orgasmatron. The intro of the Beatles’  “Strawberry Fields Forever” is Paul McCartney playing sampled flutes on a Mellotron.

Analog tape isn’t a great sample medium. The mechanisms are delicate and bulky. The tape decays over time. The little motors have to be running at exactly the right speed for the notes to play back in tune. Sampling keyboards didn’t really take off until the invention of inexpensive digital audio. Now that computers can play back audio recordings and perform all kinds of strange mathematical operations on them in real time, anything with a processor and a sound card can act as a sampler. Even high-end cell phones can perform the same functions as Ferris Bueller’s E-mu.

Some sampled instruments work better than others. A MIDI interface can only capture certain aspects of your performance: which note you played, how loud you played it, how long you held it. You can add some other performance data with the sustain pedal, with the pitch or mod wheels, and maybe with a few other parameters. That’s not nearly enough data dimensionality to convey all the infinitesimal nuances of the way a violin bow or guitar pick grips and releases a string. Stringed instruments sound extremely fake when played on a sampling keyboard. The fakeness has its own charms, but that’s a whole different instrument unto itself. Piano works well as a MIDI instrument since it practically was one to begin with. Any keyboard instrument translates well to MIDI. Massed orchestral instruments work better than solo ones. Horn samples can work okay if you don’t mind monotonous phrasing. Again, sometimes the robotic sound has its own quality. I mostly prefer more purely electronic sounds like abstract synths and samples of other songs.

One of my most entertaining experiments with sampling was called the Sikoratron. It’s a Reason patch I made using samples of Catherine Sikora, who I played with in a jazz group. To build my sample library, I recorded every member of the horn section doing solo improvisations. Catherine recorded these long, angular Coltrane-esque sax lines. By mapping different phrases to different regions of the keyboard, I could play my own far-out Catherine solos. The results were unpredictable, since the tonality of the phrases didn’t necessarily match the key that triggered them. The Sikoratron gave the best results when my non-keyboard playing friends explored it intuitively with their index fingers.

The full surrealism of MIDI is only just revealing itself. You can map sampled sounds to just about any physical action. Jerry Garcia used a MIDI guitar to play synthesized flute and such with the Grateful Dead. MIDI guitar such a cool idea in theory, since the guitar is already an amazing analog synth controller. Unfortunately, you can’t just slap a MIDI pickup unto an electric guitar, because it won’t track as accurately as you would want. You need to get an expensive special guitar made of a futuristic carbon composite. Fine if you’re Jerry Garcia, lame if you’re a normal person.

When I play electronic music live, I do my sample triggering with a video game controller. It’s more limited than a full MIDI keyboard, but for my stuff that’s a virtue. I see the future of MIDI belonging to game controllers. Check out this Synthtopia post on the world’s strangest MIDI controllers. Behold the Drumpants:

Other videos show people controlling synths and samples using pennies, a laser, a robotic exoskeleton, a sheet of paper, a driver’s license, hamsters and other odd things. Music looks like it’s going to continue to be fun in the future.