No one can agree what time signature “Row Row Row Your Boat” is in

“Row Row Row Your Boat” is one of the simplest songs in the world. Little kids sing it. It’s obvious what time signature it’s in. Or so you would think. But people are arguing about it on Reddit, and more people are arguing about it on Twitter, and there is no consensus. Is it in 4/4 with a triplet or swing feel? Is it in 3/4? Or 6/8? Or maybe 12/8? Some people have seen it notated in 2/4. A number of people say that the answer is obvious, but they don’t agree with each other what that answer is. I decided to settle the question once and for all. Using my Time Signature Song as a backing track, I recorded myself singing it in 4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4, 5/8, 10/4, 7/4, 7/8, 9/4, 9/8, 11/8, and 13/8.  

Hope that clears things up. You can all go on with your lives now.

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Building the Funky Drummer beat

I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use complex syncopated rhythms that are hard for beginners. Meanwhile, the music in beginner-level method books is rhythmically bland and unfunky. What do we do?

Heather takes a creative approach to arranging for her school bands. For each part, she creates two versions: a simplified one and an advanced one, which she places side by side in the score. Students can start out playing the simplified versions, and when they are ready to challenge themselves with the “real” music, they can just jump seamlessly over. This enables Heather to accommodate players at different levels in the same ensemble. I like this idea, and it made me think we should do something similar for groove pedagogy. My thought was this: for each groove, create a series of simplified versions, moving in incremental steps from basic quarter notes to the full syncopated complexity of the actual music. The real challenge is that we want each version of the groove to be musically satisfying, so even if you can’t handle the pure uncut funk yet, you can at least play something that sounds good.

In this post, I test the method out on the Funky Drummer break. The video below shows an Ableton Live session I made that moves from an extremely simplified  quarter note version through incrementally more advanced rhythms every four bars.

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Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

David Bowie was a great admirer of John Lennon, and like Lennon, Bowie had the gift of making weird songwriting choices sound natural. You don’t necessarily pick up on the weirdness from casual listening, but then you try to learn a Bowie tune, and it is full of surprises. “Changes” is a case in point.

From my first hearing of this song as a kid until literally yesterday, I thought the chorus went, “Time to face the strain.” Nope, it’s “Turn to face the strange.” I guess I imagined that Bowie was singing about the strain of things changing? I’m not alone in this! According to this book, some of Bowie’s own backup singers heard it as “strain” too until he corrected them.

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We’re just normal men

Why is this funny? I don’t know, but it is.

Here’s the background. It means nothing, is a reference to nothing. That is so much better than if it was an in-joke.

Does this have musical potential? I applied some Ableton audio-to-MIDI to find out.


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Frequency and EQ

EQ (equalization) plugins are volume controls for specific parts of the frequency spectrum. Every DAW, mixing board and guitar amp has EQ controls, and they can radically transform your sounds. But while EQ is an essential part of audio engineering, it is also a source of confusion for beginners. In this post, I lay out some key vocabulary.

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Why did 13th century Europeans think that major sixths were dissonant?

In Adam Neely’s new video, he responds to a question about how “the major sixth was illegal in the Renaissance.” This isn’t quite true, they liked major sixths fine in the Renaissance, but it is true that medieval theorists considered them to be dissonant.

Adam quotes an anonymous medieval music theorist who called the sixth a “vile and loathsome discord.” Another 13th century theorist, Johannes de Garlandia, had a more nuanced take; he defined the major sixth as an “imperfect dissonance”, explaining that a dissonance is imperfect “when two voices are joined so that by audition although they can to some extent match, nevertheless they do not concord.” This is weird! If you play C and the A above it on a piano or guitar, they will sound perfectly fine together, so what the heck are these medieval people talking about?

Adam attributes the idea that the sixth is dissonant to the arbitrary and ever-changing nature of musical aesthetic conventions. He also mentions changes in tuning systems, but brushes quickly past that as an explanation. I disagree about that; while cultural conventions are the major factor, I also think we shouldn’t discount tuning as a basis for those conventions. As 12tone likes to say: Fight me, Adam Neely! (No, don’t fight me, I like Adam, I was in one of his videos, he wrote the foreword to our book, he is good people.) 

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St Stephen

St Stephen might be the most “Grateful Dead” of Grateful Dead songs, the one that (for better or worse) sounds the most like them and the most unlike anyone else. It’s a cliche with the Dead to say that the live version is better than the studio version, but in the case of “St Stephen”, it’s true. The version on Aoxomoxoa is too fast and has some awkward arrangement choices. The canonical recording is the one from Live/Dead.

This is a mess, but it’s a lovable mess. A few things I particularly enjoy: the feedback from (I think) the bass at 0:21; Jerry’s off-mic yell of satisfaction at 3:37; the crowd yelling “sing it!” and so forth at 3:59; the guitar/guitar/bass trio emerging out of chaos at 4:40.

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A nice thing happened with my music theory songs

A Twitter acquaintance wrote me this series of DMs:

Screenshot of Twitter DM: "I'm trying to learn theory and basic keyboard skills (to justify my purchase of a synth) and I've been searching and searching for EXACTLY the resource inside the Music Theory Songs album on Bandcamp. 'It would be cool if as I walked around with headphones on I could...hear...the chords in context' I thought to myself many times. 'That would help me learn.' And of course HERE's GOOD OLD ETHAN HEIN having created a really solid pedagogic resource accessible in the form of music, right there in Bandcamp. Thank you!"

I am so glad he had that reaction. I haven’t been pushing my music theory songs too hard because I wasn’t sure about their value to anyone other than me. I did use some of them in my New School music theory class last semester, but I was hesitant about using the whole thing. This message was a helpful indication that I’m onto something and should lean into it. 

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Eye Know

Next fall, I’m teaching a class on musical copyright, ownership and borrowing at the New School. I will for sure be talking about De La Soul’s creative use of samples, including a deep dive into “Eye Know” from 3 Feet High and Rising.

This magnificent groove was stitched together from five different records. I list them here in their order of appearance in “Eye Know.” Continue reading “Eye Know”

The Man Who Sold The World

One of my older kid’s hipster friends introduced him to “The Man Who Sold The World” and he is super into it at the moment. I have been a Bowie fan since forever, but this song was slow to win me over.

I have learned to love the song, but I struggle to connect to the weirdly airless original recording. I originally connected more to the Nirvana cover, which I talk about below.

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