The microphone placement playlist

Last week in music tech class, we talked about audio recording, and how the placement of microphones relative to the voices or instruments can shape the sound of a recording. Mics don’t just pick up the sound of the voice or instrument itself. They also pick up the sound of the voice or instrument bouncing …

What’s Going On

For a discussion of musical form in Contemporary Music Theories, we talked about Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On.” The multitrack stems are in circulation, and they are quite a revelation. Here’s a nice walkthrough with Questlove and Motown executive Harry Weinger.

Musical simples – Teenage Dream

I’m working with Soundfly on the next installment of Theory For Producers, our ultra-futuristic online music theory course. The first unit covered the black keys of the piano and the pentatonic scales. The next one will talk about the white keys  and the diatonic modes. We were gathering examples, and we needed to find a well-known pop song that …