I continue to be severely stressed out about the state of America and the world, and I continue to reach to Aretha Franklin for emotional support. This week I soothed myself by studying “Baby, I Love You” from her 1967 album Aretha Arrives. The song is by Ronnie Shannon, who also wrote “I Never Loved …
Category Archives: Composition
The saddest chord progression ever (revisited)
First, let’s get this out of the way: the title of this post is a joke. No chord progression has any inherent emotional quality. Musical sadness is a matter of cultural convention, and even within a culture or subculture, sadness is the result of harmony interacting with melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre, phrasing, articulation and other …
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Rock Steady
I need a lot of reassurance that things are going to be okay. This Aretha Franklin groove reliably does the job for me. I say “groove” and not “song”, because while “Rock Steady” does have a minimal song structure, it’s all in support of helping you dance. The musicians on this track represent the gold …
Ahmad Jamal and hip-hop
One of my favorite rap songs is “The World Is Yours” by Nas from his classic Illmatic, produced by the great Pete Rock. Here’s Tracklib’s sample breakdown:
I made some music using modes of the harmonic series
It’s a cliche to say that the harmonic series is the basis of all of music. It is true that the first five harmonics are the basis of Western tuning. The first seven harmonics are a possible basis for the blues. You don’t tend to hear much music based on the higher harmonics, but they …
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As The World Falls Down
As kids, my siblings and I watched Labyrinth about eight billion times. It has been super gratifying that my own children love the movie too. Together with their separate David Bowie fandom, that has put “As The World Falls Down” into heavy rotation lately. When I was a kid, I didn’t especially love this song, …
Building the Amen break
I continue to refine my new groove pedagogy method: teach a complicated rhythm by presenting a very simplified version of it, then a less simplified version, then a less simplified version, until you converge on the groove in its full nuance. Imagine a pixelated image gradually gaining resolution. My goal with this is to have …
God Make Me Funky
Herbie Hancock’s band on his classic mid-70s funk albums went on without Herbie as The Headhunters. Their biggest hit, “God Make Me Funky”, has been sampled in several hundred rap songs, and rightly so, it’s an amazing groove.
Building the Funky Drummer beat
I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use …
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
David Bowie was a great admirer of John Lennon, and like Lennon, Bowie had the gift of making weird songwriting choices sound natural. You don’t necessarily pick up on the weirdness from casual listening, but then you try to learn a Bowie tune, and it is full of surprises. “Changes” is a case in point. …