I just concluded my first semester teaching Advanced Popular Music Transcription in NYU’s new pop theory and aural skills sequence. The students transcribe recorded music into notation, and also analyze production techniques and timbre. Learning by ear is an essential skill for pop musicians. Even when you are using charts, accurate ones are rarely available. …
Category Archives: Autobio
D’Angelo tribute on MusicRadar
For my most recent column, I analyzed “Brown Sugar”, “The Root”, “Playa Playa” and “Really Love”, looking at their peculiar groove, harmony and form. I’m proud of this one. I think the annotated audio waveform screencap is going to become a more regular feature of these things, because you need to be able to see …
Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester
I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes …
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Introducing my first podcast guest, my daughter
Since Bernadetta is the world’s biggest David Byrne fan, I invited her onto the pod to give her review of his current tour.
Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd on MusicRader
Big week for publication for me! I’m back on MusicRadar with articles about two 1970s rock classics, “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath and “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Both songs are so familiar, and built from such unremarkable musical components, that I didn’t realize how weird they both are until I got in …
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Podcast update, and I guess blog update
I think I found a good solution to the dilemma of wanting my posts to reach the maximum number of people while also wanting to make some money from all this labor. I decided to keep the podcast free and to pair each episode with a subscribers-only newsletter that includes notated transcriptions and other musicological …
One week left to register for Songwriters Lab
This summer I am teaching my first songwriting class open to the general public with the good people at Synthase. We are taking registrations for one more week, so if you want to sign up, now is the time! You don’t need any prior musical knowledge or ability, though if you have it, I can …
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Watermelon Man on the podcast
I continue to work through the greatest hits of my classroom practice. It’s fun and easy making episodes using material that I have presented many times in many contexts, informed by student discussions. Eventually I will run out of this stuff and my pace will slow down significantly, but for now, the episodes are pretty …
Check out this beautiful EP by one of my former songwriting students
Savelle was in my Song Factory class at the New School, and she just released her first EP. I could not be more excited for her, and I really dig these songs. Three by Savelle My favorite of the three is the bluesy opener, “Company.” I take no credit for any of this. Savelle came …
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I started a podcast
The debut episode is about “Peter Piper” by Run-DMC. This episode and the next couple will be free; then I’ll contemplate instituting a paywall. Run-DMC, Paul Simon and Bob James by Ethan Hein The debut episode of my new podcast Read on Substack