The meaning of the word “producer” has changed significantly over the history of recorded music. Before the 1960s, most record producers were businesspeople, responsible for signing checks and making sure the musicians and engineers did their jobs. Some producers took a creative role in choosing repertoire, arrangements and takes, but others were hands-off. As recording …
Category Archives: Recording
Let’s listen to some extremely slowed down Bach
In this stressful time, we all need some help attaining inner peace. I’ve been enjoying listening to and thinking about the prelude to Bach’s Violin Partita Number 3 in E major as played by Hopkinson Smith. Beautiful though this is, it’s also a lot of information packed into a small space. I thought it might …
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Glenn Gould wanted me to make this remix
Glenn Gould thought people should make their own edits of classical recordings. He explains this idea in greater depth here. I read it and thought, challenge accepted!
Teaching dynamics and loudness
When I cover dynamics and loudness in music theory class, I only spend a small part of the time talking about forte/piano, crescendo/diminuendo and so on. Once you have the Italian translations, those terms are self-explanatory. They are also frustratingly subjective, and they refer only to unamplified acoustic music. To understand dynamics in the present …
Remixing “A Day In The Life”
Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the company posted the stems online, and they remain in widespread circulation. (You can easily obtain them via a Google search.) …
How to make drums and synths from literally any sound
This is one of my favorite Andrew Huang videos. Beyond their jokey aspects, Andrew’s videos make a profound point about just how flexible recorded sound can be. This is useful information if you want to break out of the cliches, if you have bad source material to work with, or if you just enjoy pushing …
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Scratching “This Is America”
One of my projects for this summer is to realize my decades-old ambition to learn how to scratch. I borrowed a Korg Kaoss DJ controller from a friend, downloaded Serato, and have been fumbling with it for a week now. The Kaoss DJ leaves much to be desired. The built-in Kaoss Pad is cool, but otherwise …
Hip-hop as a tool for hip-hop ethnography
I believe in using music as a tool for analyzing and discussing music. To that end, I wanted to try interviewing a musician about a song of theirs, and then do a remix of the song that incorporates the interview. A rapper named Anna Diorio a.k.a. Happy Accident volunteered to participate. We discussed the writing and production …
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Real vs hyperreal vs surreal
You can put all recorded music techniques and gestures into three categories: realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist. These categories have soft boundaries that broadly overlap. Nevertheless, I find them to be a useful way to organize my thinking about sonic aesthetics.
Junto trios
In the past three weeks, thanks to the magic of the Disquiet Junto, I’ve participated in the creation of three musical trios with six strangers from the internet. Here’s a family tree of the nine tracks we all did: Artist names are in black, “part one” tracks are in blue, “part two” tracks are in …