The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.” Paul is playing piano and clavichord, Ringo plays drums and maracas, and the delightfully-named Alan Civil plays the French horn. …
Author Archives: Ethan
What is the difference between analog and digital recording?
All microphones are analog. They convert pressure waves in the air into electricity. Pressure waves in the air vibrate a little piece of metal, and that generates a fluctuating electrical current. Different kinds of mics have different specific ways of doing this. In dynamic mics, the air vibrates a magnet. This magnet is wrapped in …
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Building Hip-Hop Educators – new book chapter abstract
Oliver Kautny, a professor of music education at the University of Cologne, Germany, and founder of the Cologne Hip Hop Institute, invited me to contribute a chapter to a book that the Institute is planning to publish, an edited volume on hip-hop and music education as an open access book by Transcript Publishing. I’m co-writing …
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Where do jazz standards come from?
My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz. In this post, I collect standards of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these …
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 …
Brad Mehldau plays the Beatles
Brad Mehldau has a new album out of solo piano arrangements of Beatles songs (plus one David Bowie song for some reason.) It’s a good one! Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles by Brad Mehldau
The twelve bar blues
This week in the Song Factory, we begin talking about the conventions of the blues. One central convention is the twelve-bar form. It’s so closely associated with the blues generally that jazz musicians use the term “a blues” to mean any tune using the twelve-bar form. However, it is surprisingly difficult to define what the …
Strawberry Fields Forever
The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music …
There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you.