My daughter is getting deep into the Beatles, so I’m listening to them a lot with her. I don’t usually listen to the Beatles all that much, because I know their songs backwards and forwards and inside out. But it’s always nice to come back to the songs in a new context, and it’s rare …
Tag Archives: Beatles
Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the …
Teaching songwriting to music education students
This spring I’m having the pleasure of co-teaching the NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum. This is an opportunity to enact my long-held belief that music teachers should know how to write songs. My method for teaching songwriting is to say, okay, go write some songs. But I don’t throw the students straight into the …
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Groove melodies
Like harmony, melody works differently in grooves than it does in linear songs or Western classical compositions. In this post, I try to figure out what makes a good groove melody, and how to write one. Update: Joshua Horowitz made an interactive animation of this image! It’s so cool.
Groove harmony
See also a study of groove melody Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the meter. By his theory, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic …
Songs vs Grooves
Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves. “Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove. In structural terms, a groove is a small musical …
Eleanor Rigby
In both music theory and music tech classes, I ask the students to pick songs and analyze their structure. This semester, one student chose “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. She had a hard time with it–understandably! It’s not a complicated song, but it is an unconventional one. In this post, I’ll talk through the tune’s …
Dear Prudence
John Lennon supposedly thought that “Dear Prudence” was his best song. I agree. I have spent more time playing and remixing it than anything else in the Beatles catalog, and I continue to find new layers.
An intro to counterpoint
Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it. But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever …
Remixing “A Day In The Life”
Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the company posted the stems online, and they remain in widespread circulation. (You can easily obtain them via a Google search.) …