The NYU Music Experience Design Lab is putting together a new online music theory resource, and I’m writing a lot of the materials. We want to keep everything grounded in real-life musical practice. To that end, we’ve been gathering musical simples: phrases, riffs, and earworms that beginners can learn easily. My criteria for a good …
Category Archives: Improvisation
Pedagogical remixing with Splice
My newest music student is a gentleman named Rob Precht. As is increasingly the case with people I teach privately, Rob lives many time zones away, and he and I have never met face to face. Instead, we’ve been conducting lessons via a combination of Skype and Splice. It’s the first really practical remote music …
How does jazz work? The up-goer five version
I rewrote this post using the up-goer five text editor. Enjoy. How does cool music work? Rather than attempting the hard job of explaining how everything in cool music works, I will pick a usual song and talk you through it: “One Day My Son Of An Important Person Will Come” by Miles Davis, from …
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How the heck do you know what scale you’re supposed to use for lead guitar?
There’s a broad diversity of harmonic practices being used out there in the world of blues-based popular music, rock in particular. While a given song may not use a lot of scales and chords, the relationships between those scales and chords is rarely simple or obvious. You really just need to learn all of them. …
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Rhythm Necklace
I have a thing for circular rhythm visualizations. So I was naturally pretty excited to learn that Meara O’Reilly and Sam Tarakajian were making an app inspired by the circular drum pattern analyses of Godfried Toussaint, who helped me understand mathematically why son clave is so awesome. The app is called Rhythm Necklace, and I …
BB King gives us a guitar lesson
Did you know that the man has some guitar lessons online? I did not. They are invaluable. Let him show you how it’s done.
Mobile music app recommendations
Phones and tablets have rich potential as musical instruments. Here’s my list of interesting music apps. The iOS apps are ones that I’ve personally used and enjoyed. I haven’t tried most of the Android ones, but they were recommended by people whose opinions I trust.
Why is there so much Auto-Tune on everything?
See also an explanation of how Auto-Tune works When we talk about Auto-Tune, we’re talking about two different things. There’s the intended use, which is to subtly correct pitch problems (and not just with vocalists; it’s extremely useful for horns and strings.) The ubiquity of pitch correction in the studio should be no great mystery; …
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Composing speech
Robert Davidson’s first-ever tweet is a remarkable one: https://twitter.com/robcomposer/status/558447982807248896 Rob’s tweet raises three profound questions in my mind.
Terry Riley and Taylor Swift
I don’t have much of a relationship to… what should we call it? Modern classical music? That’s the term commonly used by ignoramuses like me, but it’s a silly one, contradictory on its face. The practitioners themselves call it “new music,” which is even worse, since it implies that all that other music out there …