She’s Leaving Home

My kids are totally obsessed with the Beatles right now, much to my ongoing delight, so I’m learning how to play more of their songs. Brad Mehldau motivated me to take a look at “She’s Leaving Home”, which I learned about a thousand years ago on guitar and haven’t thought about in a while. It’s a good one! Apparently, when Paul McCartney was ready to record the song, George Martin was busy. Paul was eager to get moving on it, so he asked a guy named Mike Leander to do the harp and string arrangement. Presumably Leander transcribed Paul’s piano part and embellished from there. Harpist Sheila Bromberg was the first woman to play on a Beatles record.

The production is pretty tame by Sgt Pepper’s standards, but there are still some intriguing choices. There’s a single-tap tape echo on the harp, which is most plainly audible on the intro. Paul and John double-track their voices on the choruses, too. Those touches are just enough to keep the track in the world of psychedelia, rather than the world of fake classical like “Eleanor Rigby.” Hear the harp without the tape echo on this early take:

Continue reading

Speech to song with iZotope and Ableton

A while back I saw this viral video of Amber Wagner giving a motivational speech in her car. As you can tell from the video’s title, she uses extremely NSFW language.

Beyond its inspirational value, Amber’s speech is appealingly musical. I grabbed the audio and filed it away. Then during my morning commute this week, I was making a beat using using samples of my kids splashing around in the bath. I tried out Amber’s speech on top and it fit well, so I pulled a non-sweary excerpt and looped it up. Here’s the result:

I processed Amber’s voice with iZotope Nectar and Ableton’s vocoder. I also filled out the harmony with bass sampled from “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus and piano from “Thelonious” by Thelonious Monk.

Continue reading

The vocoder and Auto-Tune

The vocoder is one of those mysterious technologies that’s far more widely used than understood. Here I explain what it is, how it works, and why you should care.

Casual music listeners know the vocoder best as a way to make the robot voice effect that Daft Punk uses all the time.

Here’s Huston Singletary demonstrating the vocoder in Ableton Live.

You may be surprised to learn that you use a vocoder every time you talk on your cell phone. Also, the vocoder gave rise to Auto-Tune, which, love it or hate it, is the defining sound of contemporary popular music. Let’s dive in!

Continue reading

Remixing Verdi with Ableton Live

Later this week I’m doing a teaching demo for a music technology professor job. The students are classical music types who don’t have a lot of music tech background, and the task is to blow their minds. I’m told that a lot of them are singers working on Verdi’s Requiem. My plan, then, is to walk the class through the process of remixing a section of the Requiem with Ableton Live. This post is basically the script for my lecture.

Verdi remixed

Continue reading

Anatomy of a Disquiet Junto project

I participate in Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto whenever I have the time and the brain space. Once a week, he sends out an assignment, and you have a few days to produce a new piece of music to fit. Marc asks that you discuss your process in the track descriptions on SoundCloud, and I’m always happy to oblige. But my descriptions are usually terse. This week I thought I’d dive deep and document the whole process from soup to nuts, with screencaps and everything.

Here’s this week’s assignment, which is simpler than usual:

Please answer the following question by making an original recording: “What is the room tone of the Internet?” The length of your recording should be two minutes.

Data Centre

Continue reading

The Doctor Who theme song: analog electronica

When I was in third grade, my mom and stepfather went on academic sabbatical to London for six months, taking my sister and me with them. I guess I’m grateful for the chance to experience another culture and everything, but it was a rough six months. I missed my dad, school, New York, the Muppet Show. British third graders are manic xenophobes of Eric Cartman proportions. It was the first time I had ever experienced genuine alien-ness, and I didn’t like it. The best thing about being there was Doctor Who.

Continue reading

Herbie Hancock gets future shock

Herbie Hancock is a musician’s musician. He pushed the boundaries of acoustic piano in the sixties. He found a uniquely personal voice on an array of synthesizers in the seventies. And in the eighties, he helped bring turntablism into the pop mainstream.

People have been experimenting with recording playback devices as musical instruments for a hundred years. But the concept didn’t cross into mass consciousness until the rise of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1980s. The breakthrough moment for a lot of people was Herbie’s song “Rockit” from his 1983 album Future Shock. The song includes turntable scratching over a blend of live and programmed drums and synths, along with some heavily processed robo-vocals. Future Shock is named for the Curtis Mayfield song, which is itself named for the Alvin Toffler book. The basic gist is, “Too much change too fast is stressful for people.” Herbie, at least, has managed to get some pleasure from his future shock. Continue reading