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, rhythm, swing
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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, rhythm, soul, swing, syncopation, tchaikovsky, tricky sam nanton
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In Annie Hall, young Woody Allen explains to his doctor that he won’t do his homework because the universe is expanding, so what’s the point? His mother exasperatedly tells him, “You’re here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!” I post this because I’ve been reading Coming Of Age In The Milky Way by Tim Ferris, [...]
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, rhythm, rock
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Life appeared very early in the planet’s history, earlier than you might have naively guessed. But then for billions of years, it existed only as simple single cells floating in the ocean or sitting in cracks in the rocks. Big complex creatures visible to the naked eye didn’t appear until the planet was two-thirds of [...]
Filed in Evolution
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Also tagged biology, birds, emergence, Evolution, fish, mammals, meditation, microbes, reptiles, space, wikipedia
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“Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads and Brian Eno is one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.
Filed in Composition, Hardware, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Recording
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Also tagged attention, beatles, brian eno, david byrne, Improvisation, meditation, mixing, philosophy, Recording, recursion, reggae, remixes, sly and the family stone, talking heads, tape, tape editing
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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, rhythm, rubato, steven mithen
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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, rhythm
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