Twelve remixes of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac

I’m working on a podcast episode about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, a perennial object of debate in the music theory world because no one can agree what key it’s in. This is because the melody doesn’t align with the chords particularly, and neither the melody nor the chords belong unambiguously to any specific key. To demonstrate its harmonic flexibility, I got the vocal stem so I could put different chord progressions under it. Then I started trying different instrumentals underneath it, and found a lot of them that work, some uncannily well. My kids helped me too. Here are the best ones.

The Bach one is my favorite, because the fit is positively uncanny in places. My daughter requested the Roblox song and Pachelbel’s canon, both of which are excellent fits as well. Enjoy.

Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate

Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter.

In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein

The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one

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In A Silent Way, side B: “In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” by Dr. Ethan Hein

Arguably the best jazz fusion that anyone has ever recorded

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Free improvisation

Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jazz; Ramin is a classical composer and performer, and he improvises in that idiom too. I might have been expecting something like Keith Jarrett, but Ramin started straight in with jagged rhythms, dissonant harmonies and extremes of dynamics and register. You can hear the first minute and a half on Facebook. The older recording below conveys some of the flavor of the performance I saw, though it’s shorter and less extreme.

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Low end theory

How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play a bassline, you should know how to listen to them.

You can think of the bass as serving a dual role: a percussive one and a melodic/harmonic one. In pop, the percussive role matters more. The bassline holds the groove together, and the rhythms matter more than the pitches. The best way to understand that side of things is just to listen to songs you like, focus on the bassline and scat sing along.

Below, I list seven common types of basslines found in Anglo-American pop, what you might call the basic basslines (ha). I show each of them playing the Axis progression in C using a standard rock rhythm. Then I give some examples of each drawn from actual music. Continue reading “Low end theory”

I’m in this Adam Neely video about AI

I make a couple of brief appearances in Adam Neely’s latest video about generative AI music. Neither of us think it’s a good idea.

Two-chord shuttles on the pod

After talking about them in aural skills class, I figured it was time to do an episode about them. This one includes some compositional ideas of my own in addition to all the examples from the pop canon.

The two-chord shuttle by Dr. Ethan Hein

A foundational building block of funk

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I love when my songwriting students drop albums

A student in my Song Factory class at the New School a couple of years ago has just released his first album. His style is outside my usual listening tastes, but I admire how personal and specific his tracks are: the found sounds, the synth bleeps, the noisy analog tape recording, the layered vocals.

Carson loves intentionally detuned guitars and synths. Check out the last song, “Hurry”, which has a seasick pitch wobble like a warped record. Every time you think that the creative possibilities of rock have been exhausted, someone like Carson comes along and says, okay, but what about the universe of pitches in between the piano keys? It was a real joy having this guy in class, and I’m glad everyone else gets to enjoy his music too.

Satisfaction

I am normally resistant to writing about this kind of overexposed Boomer anthem, but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting tune to analyze on the first day of pop aural skills class, because it’s both simple and harmonically interesting.

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It Takes Two

In 1972, James Brown produced a single for one of his backup singers, Lyn Collins, called “Think (About It)”.

If you listen to this without any context, it sounds like a perfectly fine funk song with an unusual rubato introduction. But then, at 1:22, there’s suddenly that break, followed immediately by that hook. Sing it with me, 80s kids.

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Bob Weir tribute on MusicRadar

I drew on some of my previous Grateful Dead analyses for my newest MusicRader column, Bob Weir in Five Songs and a Jam.