The same Disquiet Junto project that spawned this wildly recursive remix also involved a few more people remixing my remix. Here’s a family tree of the three first generation source tracks, the seven second generation remixes of those tracks, and the three third generation remixes of the second generation remixes. You can hear the three third-generation metaremixes below.
Category Archives: Copyright and Authorship
Prepping my rap and rock class at Montclair State
This summer, I’m teaching Cultural Significance of Rap and Rock at Montclair State University. It’s my first time teaching it, and it’s also the first time anyone has taught it completely online. The course is cross-listed under music and African-American studies. Here’s a draft of my syllabus, omitting details of the grading and such. I welcome your questions, comments …
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Ilan meets the Fugees
My youngest private music production student is a kid named Ilan. He makes moody trip-hop and deep house using Ableton Live. For our session today, Ilan came in with a downtempo, jazzy hip-hop instrumental. I helped him refine and polish it, and then we talked about his ideas for what kind of vocal might work on top. He wanted an …
Project-based music technology teaching
I use a project-based approach to teaching music technology. Technical concepts stick with you better if you learn them in the course of making actual music. Here’s the list of projects I assign to my college classes and private students. I’ve arranged them from easiest to hardest. The first five projects are suitable for a …
Beatmaking fundamentals
I’m currently working with the Ed Sullivan Fellows program, an initiative of the NYU MusEDLab where we mentor up and coming rappers and producers. Many of them are working with beats they got from YouTube or SoundCloud. That’s fine for working out ideas, but to get to the next level, the Fellows need to be making their …
Space Oddity: from song to track
If you have ever wondered what it is that a music producer does, David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” provides an excellent example. A producer turns this: into this:
Ethan’s Trax
Ethan’s Trax is an iTunes playlist I maintain that includes all of the music I’ve ever recorded. Well, more accurately, it’s all of the music that I care to be reminded of. I haven’t included every draft and dead end. But if a track has any artistic or sentimental value whatsoever to me, it’s in Ethan’s Trax. As of this writing, …
Goodbye SoundCloud?
I love SoundCloud. I love it for being an exceptionally easy way to share my music with people all over the world. I love the community aspect, especially the Disquiet Junto. I have all of my students host their portfolios there. But like a lot of the electronic musicians who form the heart of the …
Diverge, converge, diverge, converge
Soon after I became a composer, Marc Weidenbaum made me a meta-composer. Which I guess makes him a meta-meta-composer? A hyperproducer? There isn’t a word for what Marc is, aside from “awesome.” The most concise way I can think of to describe what he does: he writes reviews of music that doesn’t exist yet and …
The Blurred Lines lawsuit
Marvin Gaye is one of the great singers and songwriters of all time, with a status deservedly approaching secular sainthood. Robin Thicke is a sleazy dirtbag who made a giant pile of money by knocking off one of Marvin’s songs to produce a rapey earworm, accompanied by a porn video. Naturally, I side with Team …