Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s …
Continue reading “Loop mode: improvisation is composition is recording”
There are a lot of different musical instruments out there. Just about all of them share four basic components: a harmonic oscillator, a source of noise, a control surface for modulation, and a resonator.
Japan doesn’t have a substantial psychedelic drug culture that I’m aware of, but you’d never guess it from Katamari Damacy.
See a followup post on the Gregorys’ breakout hit, the “Bed Intruder Song.” The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on a stranger’s blog. There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of …
The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original recording of “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer”, but there are some contenders. …
We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re …
Continue reading “Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.”
It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
Biz Markie. Who doesn’t love him? Our broken intellectual property system, that’s who. Biz belongs to the period in the late eighties and early nineties that many hip-hop heads refer to as the golden age. The tracks of this period were dense with samples and quotes, most of which were used without permission. Biz was …
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly they used it as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first musicians to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated …
