Having transcribed verses by KRS-One and Lil’ Kim, I wanted to take on something more current. I decided to do Noname‘s haunting neo-soul-infused song “Don’t Forget About Me.” The song evokes D’Angelo, and calls him out by name. In some ways, this Noname track was an easier transcription project than the verses by KRS-One or …
Category Archives: Music Teaching
Transcribing Lil’ Kim
Toni Blackman recommends a rap writing exercise: take an existing flow and replace the lyrics with your own. In order to do this with my music education students in the spring, I’m going to provide them with notated transcriptions as well as recordings. I’ve transcribed a couple of Toni’s recommended verses. The first was KRS-One’s …
Transcribing KRS-One
In my most recent dissertation interview with Toni Blackman, I asked how a non-rapper like me might approach rap songwriting with music education students. The best approach, of course, would be to just invite Toni herself to come in and teach it, but I wanted suggestions for what to do when that’s not possible. She …
Brandon Bennett interview remix – What is hip-hop education?
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of …
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Adam Neely video on rap covers
I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See …
Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio. Dissertation …
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Lesson Plan Sundays on Twitch with Will Kuhn
Join me and Will Kuhn every Sunday at 5 pm on Twitch! We talk lesson planning, music tech, beatmaking, songwriting, and the joys of teaching music in a pandemic.
Let’s rename the scales something more memorable
Music theory is hard. Its naming conventions make it harder. Scale names are especially confusing. For example, the diatonic modes are named after places in and around ancient Greece. I’m sure that Aristoxenes found these names memorable and meaningful in 300 BC, and maybe medieval European theorists felt that way too, but now they are …
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Will Kuhn and I finished our book
For the past year or so, Will Kuhn and I have been writing a book for Oxford University Press called Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Late last night, we submitted the finished manuscript to Oxford. There are still multiple rounds of copyedits and page proofs to do before it hits …
I learned how to make animated gifs
Diatonic chords from the C major scale: