Electric and electronic instruments of 20th century pop

We’re spending the last chunk of Advanced Popular Music Transcription talking about the sonic and timbral aspects of pop production. This week we’re focusing on identifying various instrument timbres and talking about their stylistic associations. I won’t be talking (much) about the guitar, because my students already know what guitar sounds like. Instead, I’ll focus on electronic instruments that are less familiar.

Electric piano

The two most commonly used electric pianos are various incarnations of the Fender Rhodes and the Wurlitzer. They sound similar and work in the same way: when you press a key, a hammer strikes a thin metal tine like a tuning fork. This tine vibrates next to a magnetic pickup like the ones in an electric guitar. Rhodes and Wurli sound guitar-like not only because they use the same basic physics, but also because people often run them through guitar amps, and sometimes through guitar effects pedals too.

Ray Charles – “What’d I Say” (1959)

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Amen break listening guide

In Advanced Pop Transcription class, we are entering the part of the semester where we turn our focus away from notes and rhythms and toward sound. One of the most important sounds in the past five decades of dance and hip-hop is the Amen break. In this post, I give context for the break and highlight some noteworthy usages over the past four decades. Continue reading “Amen break listening guide”

Uncharted Territory, The Number Ones, 500 Songs, and a different 500 songs

This post discusses a book, a web column, a podcast, and an academic research project that all have the same goal: to get their arms around the past 50 to 100 years of Anglo-American popular music. There have been plenty of surveys of rock and pop history, but data analysis and online platforms are making it possible to expand their scope. Continue reading “Uncharted Territory, The Number Ones, 500 Songs, and a different 500 songs”

Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 2000 to 2025

As with my post about rap songs from 1986 to 2000, this is not a complete or systematic survey. Instead, it’s a selection of songs that I love from different styles and eras, that are musically and lyrically interesting, and that point to larger trends.

Missy Elliott – “Work It” (2002)

I recommend the hilariously filthy album version. It sounds so futuristic all these years later. The backwards part in the chorus is “put my thang down flip it and reverse it”, reversed. My students agree that not only has this track aged well, it still sounds like it comes from the future. Continue reading “Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 2000 to 2025”

Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000

My Advanced Pop Transcription class has started our rap unit, where the students have to pick a verse and transcribe eight bars of it into notation. In preparation for that project, we are listening to and analyzing tracks from various styles and eras, and also talking about the larger social and political context of the music. I won’t be getting into any of that context here, but if you do want to read about it, you might enjoy this paper I wrote about the weirdest white rap cover ever.

Anyway, I chose these five songs because they represent some big trends in the music in the 80s and 90s, and because I like them. I’ll talk about more recent developments in hip-hop in a future post. Continue reading “Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000”

We should be counting most pop music in 8/4

Almost all Anglo-American pop music is in 4/4, aside from occasional 6/8 ballads. However, dancers tend to count off “five, six, seven, eight.” Why are they counting like this? Is it because they are thinking in 8/4 or 8/8? If so, they are right to do so. I think everybody should be counting pop music in 8. The history of Anglo-American popular music over the past hundred years is a steady progression through slower tempos and finer subdivisions. We already made the transition from counting in 2 to counting in 4, and counting in 8 would be the next logical step.

Let’s go back 120 years and consider Scott Joplin.

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D’Angelo tribute on MusicRadar

For my most recent column, I analyzed “Brown Sugar”, “The Root”, “Playa Playa” and “Really Love”, looking at their peculiar groove, harmony and form. I’m proud of this one.

I think the annotated audio waveform screencap is going to become a more regular feature of these things, because you need to be able to see the exact offbeat placement of those snare hits!

Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester

I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes on pop and non-Western music. This change was driven by the chair, Sarah Louden, who put a heroic amount of work into it. It meant that I was suddenly qualified to teach music theory. At the same time, the music ed program entered a crisis that it hasn’t yet recovered from, so now I’m finding myself mostly teaching theory and aural skills.

I have taught theory before and am confident about it, but I had some imposter syndrome going into aural skills teaching because I had a terrible time with those classes myself and am generally not a strong music reader. However, the pop classes are more about aural analysis of recordings and improvisation, and those are areas where I am rock solid. I even started working on a pop aural skills textbook with my colleague Samantha Bassler, and our proposal is currently working its way through the review process, so, fingers crossed.

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Introducing my first podcast guest, my daughter

Since Bernadetta is the world’s biggest David Byrne fan, I invited her onto the pod to give her review of his current tour.

AI slop and musical creativity

Next week, my NYU graduate seminar on technology in music education is supposed to start talking about AI: large language models, prompt-based generators, stem separation and so on. I am not feeling much enthusiasm for this unit, for a couple of reasons. First of all, we are currently talking about YouTube, which is a richly complicated and important music topic for music ed, and for music generally. I decided that we should definitely push AI a week to spend more time on YouTube. But then I was thinking, maybe we could just give AI a miss entirely? Or is it irresponsible of me to deprive the grad students just because I don’t enjoy thinking about it?

As I was working all this through, I wanted to put my distaste into words. I wrote a free-associative BlueSky thread and then figured it deserved expansion into a proper essay. So here we go. First, to set the stage, let’s contemplate this image of Shrimp Jesus, sourced from Wikipedia’s AI Slop article.

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