How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play …
Author Archives: Ethan
I’m in this Adam Neely video about AI
I make a couple of brief appearances in Adam Neely’s latest video about generative AI music. Neither of us think it’s a good idea.
Two-chord shuttles on the pod
After talking about them in aural skills class, I figured it was time to do an episode about them. This one includes some compositional ideas of my own in addition to all the examples from the pop canon. The two-chord shuttle by Dr. Ethan Hein A foundational building block of funk Read on Substack
I love when my songwriting students drop albums
A student in my Song Factory class at the New School a couple of years ago has just released his first album. His style is outside my usual listening tastes, but I admire how personal and specific his tracks are: the found sounds, the synth bleeps, the noisy analog tape recording, the layered vocals. Carson …
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Satisfaction
I am normally resistant to writing about this kind of overexposed Boomer anthem, but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting tune to analyze on the first day of pop aural skills class, because it’s both simple and harmonically interesting.
It Takes Two
In 1972, James Brown produced a single for one of his backup singers, Lyn Collins, called “Think (About It)”. If you listen to this without any context, it sounds like a perfectly fine funk song with an unusual rubato introduction. But then, at 1:22, there’s suddenly that break, followed immediately by that hook. Sing it …
Bob Weir tribute on MusicRadar
I drew on some of my previous Grateful Dead analyses for my newest MusicRader column, Bob Weir in Five Songs and a Jam.
The plan for Pop Theory II and Pop Aural Skills II this semester
This semester I am once again teaching pop theory and aural skills at NYU. I have done some previous reflections on these classes. The students are undergrads, mostly studying instrumental and vocal performance, songwriting and music technology. They range in stylistic background from pop to rock to jazz to R&B to hip-hop to musical theater, and there …
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RIP Bob Weir
Bob Weir’s organically quirky songwriting is one of the central building blocks of my musical understanding. Here’s a solo guitar rendition of my favorite of his tunes.
Season two of the podcast
I took a long break from podcasting, not intentionally, just focusing on other things. I guess it makes sense to call the 30 episodes I did last year the first season, and the latest episode the beginning of the second season. Happy listening! Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new …