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 …
Category Archives: Autobio
Composing improvisationally with Ableton Live
I just completed a batch of new music, which was improvised freely in the studio and then later shaped into structured tracks. https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/sets/tabla-breakbeat-science I thought it would be helpful to document the process behind this music, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I expect to be teaching this kind of production a lot …
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Tabla Breakbeat Science is dropping an album
My new studio band has an album nearing completion. It’s called Music Information Retrieval, because our studio time was sponsored by NYU’s Music and Audio Research Lab — we contributed to a database of multitracks that will be used for music informatics research. We made our DJ debut over the weekend at the Rubin Museum, …
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The state of the lullaby
Anna wanted to know what my friends are singing to their kids for lullabies. I posted the question on Facebook and got about fifty times more responses than I was expecting. Since I now have all this (highly unscientific) data about lullaby trends in 2014, I figured I would write it all up. Here’s what …
Everyone can and should be making music
I have a strongly held belief about musical talent: there is no such thing. Every neurotypical human is born with the ability to learn music, the same way the vast majority of us are born with the ability to learn to walk and talk. We still have to do the learning, though; otherwise the capacity …
Video production is hard but fun
I’ve been producing a bunch of new videos for future iterations of Play With Your Music, with the help of the good people at the NYU Blended Learning Lab. So far, we’ve done two sets. There’s a series of tutorials on producing samples, beats and melodies using the in-browser digital audio workstation Soundation:
Milo is walking
Reflections on the MOOC
This week marks the conclusion of the first iteration of Play With Your Music, the music production MOOC I’ve been contributing to this past semester. Creating and running the MOOC has been a learning experience for everybody involved. It certainly has been for me. I do most of my music teaching one on one, and …
Thesis presentation
Here’s the presentation I’ll be giving of my masters thesis next week, enjoy.
My masters thesis is done
You can read it here on the blog or as a PDF.