Toni Blackman is one of the three hip-hop educators I’m studying for my dissertation. She teaches freestyle rap as a way to build authentic confidence, and she gave a talk and a workshop on the subject at Ableton’s 2018 Loop Summit. Ableton recently posted the video of Toni’s talk. She concludes it with a freestyle, …
Continue reading “Toni Blackman on the wisdom of the cypher”
I have come to believe that Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label …
Music evolves the way life does: through change in the heritable characteristics of populations over successive generations. Most of the heritable characteristics of music are abstractions like rhythm patterns and chord progressions. However, you can also see heritability at work more obviously in the form of sampling. It’s especially illuminating when a song samples a …
Toni Blackman‘s hip-hop education practice resembles music therapy as much as it does traditional music teaching, so it makes perfect sense that she would release a hip-hop meditation album. I did a remix of my favorite parts for my dissertation mixtape: Toni argues that freestyling builds authentic confidence that comes from the soul, and that …
I was invited by Jason Richardson to take part in a Shinobi Cuts remix chain, an album where each track is a remix of the previous track. The final remix is done by the creator of the track that started the whole thing off, making for a kind of musical strange loop. When you listen to the …
A while back I saw this viral video of Amber Wagner giving a motivational speech in her car. As you can tell from the video’s title, she uses extremely NSFW language. Beyond its inspirational value, Amber’s speech is appealingly musical. I grabbed the audio and filed it away. Then during my morning commute this week, …
In my recent post about “Giant Steps,” I briefly mentioned the idea of doing improvisational remixes of jazz recordings. This is a big enough idea to merit a post of it own. My slow-tempo remix of the tune includes a solo section that I played by slicing up the melody, putting each note on a sample pad, …
“Blind Alley” by The Emotions is a funk/soul tune best known as a crucial source of breakbeats for golden age rap songs. Beyond its sampling value, “Blind Alley” is also a fabulously useful tool for teaching how you make chords in the key of F major.Â
Every semester, I have my music technology students do a project using found sound. They record environmental sounds with their phones, and then they create tracks that incorporate those sounds somehow. The only rule is that they have to use at least one found sound–it doesn’t have to be their own. Otherwise, they can use …
My favorite rap song of the moment is Young Thug’s “High,” which prominently samples Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” https://soundcloud.com/inabundnce/young-thug-rocket-man-remix
